The City of Clovis Cottage Home Program will receive a Silver 2019 National Planning Achievement Award for A Best Practice from the American Planning Association (APA).
The award recognizes the city’s program for adding affordable housing and turning allies into new pocket neighborhoods. The Cottage Home Program is one of 20 Achievement Award recipients this year.
“To get an award from the National Planning Association is huge because they represent planning throughout the country,” Dwight Kroll, City of Clovis director of Planning and Development Services, said. “The fact that they recognized our program, we are very humbled by that.”
The Cottage Home program enables homeowners to construct cottage homes on their properties, providing more affordable housing to the area without the city having to build massive multi-family housing complexes.
Kroll said the idea for the project started with a 12-member advisory committee made up of citizens who were working on how to build on the success of Old Town Clovis. Kroll said the committee saw examples of cottage homes in Davis and decided to do the same in alleys in Old Town.
“That sparked it. As we looked at it, we thought ‘what if we hired a designer to design the plan and we can hand out plans for free to people who would build these things so they don’t have to spend $10,000 on a set of plans and then having to go through plan checks,” Kroll said. “They’re already plan checked, we design them.”
Eligible homeowners may choose, free of charge, one of three city-approved floor plans at less than 400 square feet.
Kroll said the cottage homes have various benefits.
“We thought it would do a number of things,” Kroll said. “It would help clean up the alleys, it would provide some additional housing, it would utilize property in downtown that have a lot of junk just stored in the back.”