How To Revive the Starter Home

I’ve long maintained that Kirkwood’s tear-down crisis is merely a symptom of how expensive our land has become. After you spend $500k to purchase the lot, spending another $200k to tear down the existing small home that sits on the lot and build a new bigger one seems like small potatoes. The Venn diagram of people who can afford to spend $500k to live in Kirkwood but don’t mind doing so in a smaller, older home is nearly non-existent.

If we want starter homes for young families to remain an existing typology in Kirkwood, mandating the homes stay small and affordable isn’t going to help much. You need to figure out how to make the land (which accounts for anywhere between 65% and 100% of the value of your typical tear-down property) more affordable as well.

How to Make Land More Affordable

There are two primary ways to reduce the costs of something: You can either increase the supply of it or reduce the demand for it. But when it comes to land in Kirkwood, reducing demand is not a very good solution. As a baseline, we want people to want to live and work in Kirkwood, and homes are most folks’ single largest investment, so we want them to appreciate in value. High demand is a good thing.

Now, lowering the cost of land by increasing the supply of it comes with its own set of challenges. The famous thing about land is that they’re not making any more of it, so increasing supply is hard. What you can do, though, is stack multiple homes on top of one another, thus increasing the supply of a sort of “artificial” land via multi-story, multifamily buildings. At the currently under-construction 144 West Adams, for example, instead of one family shouldering the cost of the underlying land, four families will split it four ways

If you read me, you know I don’t have many qualms about small apartment/condo buildings in Kirkwood and think they offer a good solution to the problem. But I also know these small condo buildings aren’t quite what folks mean when they lament the disappearance of starter homes in Kirkwood. Townhomes might get closer to what folks are comfortable with, but even those fall a little short of the platonic ideal most people have in mind when it comes to the starter home.

Really, what I think people yearn for in the starter home is a sort of anti-urban form: a detached, single-family home, with its own backyard, owned by the family living inside it. Which brings me to the other way you can lower the cost of land in Kirkwood: you can break it into smaller pieces.

Think of it like a stock split or an ETF. When the price of an individual share of stock gets too high because so many people want to buy it, there’s a lot of value to be found in letting people buy a smaller fraction of the whole thing. And because new people can now afford to buy a piece of the stock when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, demand rises and the value of the overall value of the stock goes up. The same is true of land in Kirkwood: If you could make smaller pieces of land available at a lower price, the overall value of the land would go up while simultaneously becoming more attainable to the average family looking to move to Kirkwood. And because land in Kirkwood is now available to families of more modest means, we can expect that land to host more modestly sized, affordable homes.

Kirkwood’s Minimum Lot Size Rules

Unfortunately, Kirkwood’s zoning code sharply limits the feasibility of this approach. The vast majority of Kirkwood’s land is zoned for one of four single-family residential zones. The main difference between these four zones is the minimum amount of land someone must own before they’re allowed to build a house on their property.

As you can see in the map above, these minimum lot sizes range from 7,500 sqft at the low end (R-4), to a full acre at the high end (R-1). In the vast majority of the cases, Kirkwood’s lots hew relatively closely to this limit: Most of the existing lots in R-4 zone fall somewhere between 7,500 and 10,000 sqft.

That means that in the vast majority of cases, even if the owner of a small teardown on an existing lot wanted to split the lot in half and build two modestly sized homes, they wouldn’t be allowed, thus leaving a sale to someone with grand designs on a McMansion as their only financially viable option.

An Example

Take the home below, at 511 W Rose Hill Ave, for example. In 2020, the existing 929 sqft home that was built in 1941 was torn down and replaced with a new 2,572 sqft one. Because the lot is only ~10,100 sqft, it was impossible to split it into two pieces while still maintaining the 7,500 sqft required for each half to be able to host a new home. The owner’s only choice (if they wanted a fair financial return on what was likely their single biggest investment) was to sell to someone who they likely knew planned to tear it down and build something much bigger and more expensive in its place.

The City of St. Louis recently reduced their minimum residential lot size from the existing 4,000 sqft down to 2,000 sqft. Let’s say that Kirkwood decided to follow suit and reduce its own minimum lot sizes. Obviously, Kirkwood is a suburb, so it makes some intuitive sense that its lots would be bigger than those in the region’s primary city, so let’s say they don’t even reduce them to St. Louis’s previous standard, but instead settled for a relatively modest reform of 5,000 sqft minimums.

With new 5,000 sqft lots on the books, all of a sudden, splitting the existing 10,100 sqft lot into two more affordable lots becomes viable. The existing lot is only 85ft wide, so you’d also have to reduce the “minimum lot width” rule from its current 60 ft down to something like 40 ft, but otherwise you’re in business.

Won’t That Just Give Us Homes on Small Lots?

Now, the natural concern is that if you made those tweaks, you’d still get the McMansions, they’d just be on smaller lots. But luckily for you, Kirkwood has many other zoning rules that guard against this outcome.

The first thing we’d need to check is whether the property in question is landmarked or located in a historic district that would make it subject to more strenuous review by the Landmarks Commission. We obviously don’t want people to all of a sudden try to tear down their historic homes to build brand new smaller ones. Luckily, as you can see on the map below, 511 W Rose Hill does not meet any of these designations. It was just a regular old affordable, small, 1940s home.

Then, we’ll want to check that there are rules in place to ensure the houses that replace that smaller ones can’t be monstrosities that are way too big for the smaller lots we’ve created. Luckily, Kirkwood’s stringent setback requirements prevent this. Both new homes would have to feature 8ft worth of side yard setback on each side. That leaves you somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,180 sqft of buildable lot on each of the two new properties:

Then, after you factor in the minimum front yard setbacks (35ft) and back yard setbacks (30ft) requirements of the R-4 district as well, you end up with room for two lots with ~1,263 sqft of buildable space each.

And funnily enough, that is almost the exact median size of the average home being torn down according to the city’s 2023 Attainable Housing Study:

Even if you built a two-story home on these sites, you’d max out at a home of just over 2,500 sqft, nearly 1,000 square feet smaller than the median-sized teardown replacement in Kirkwood under the current rules.

Would everybody with land to sell in Kirkwood go for this option? No. Kirkwood is a nice place to live and it’s natural that people are going to want to build nice big houses here. But some people almost certainly would. The Zillow estimate for the existing home at 511 W Rose Hill is $907,900. If the owner could sell both new homes on the newly split for $455,000 (which I think would be relatively easy) they’d come out better off, but so too would the buyers: Two families would find a place to live in Kirkwood rather than just one, and they’d do so at half the cost of what it would take to purchase the home that sits there now.

$455,000 is still quite a chunk of money, but you have to remember that’s for a brand new home with no asbestos, no lead pipes or paint, and modern energy-efficient appliances, HVAC, and insulation. As these modestly sized homes age, their relative affordability will continue to improve.

A Simplified Code

The City Council wants Kirkwood to be more affordable, but it also feels that it has a responsibility to maintain the single-family typology that they see as irrevocably tied to Kirkwood’s signature quaintness. Reducing minimum lot sizes is one way to thread that needle. If you

Kirkwood doesn’t need four flavors of single-family zoning, each with its own arbitrary minimum lot size. In flood-prone areas like Sugar Creek, we could keep the current one‑acre minimum. But everywhere else, let’s consolidate into a single, more flexible district with a 5,000 sqft minimum. That would level the playing field across neighborhoods by ensuring everyone plays by the same rules, lower land costs for families, and make it possible to build smaller homes again. It’s a modest reform that would make a real difference without sacrificing Kirkwood’s character.