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Permit-Ready Housing: From Pattern Books to Policy
April 22 @ 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm
Building a home in Virginia shouldn’t require months of navigating uncertain, costly review processes. Yet for most builders — especially small-scale developers and first-time homeowners — that’s exactly the barrier they face. Permit-ready housing programs offer a practical fix: pre-approved building designs that can move directly to construction, cutting red tape without cutting quality.
This webinar explores how permit-ready and pattern book programs work, where they’ve succeeded, and what it takes to implement them locally. Featuring two practitioners working at the cutting edge of this approach, the session connects national best practices with a live implementation underway right here in Virginia.
A pioneer in pre-approved housing programs, Matthew has worked with municipalities across the country to build catalogs of permit-ready designs that make diverse housing types faster and cheaper to build. He brings experience from Fayetteville, Overland Park, South Bend, and dozens of other communities across the country. For the Incremental Development Alliance, he designed the code stress-testing process that kicked off meaningful infill reforms in South Bend, Kalamazoo, and Overland Park — all three of which now have pre-approved building programs.
He has delivered housing infill workshops across the country and authored a ground-up curriculum rewrite that has anchored the organization’s programming for nearly a decade. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, Matthew was elected four times and served nearly 13 years on the City Council, where he recruited a team of champions and authored legislation on accessory dwelling units, pocket neighborhoods, food trucks, and traffic calming. Matthew’s planning and design proposals have won grants or awards from the National Endowment for the Arts four times, the Knight Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Congress for the New Urbanism, and others.
Kellie Brown is the Director of the City of Charlottesville Neighborhood Services Department, overseeing the City’s Housing Division, Comprehensive and Current planning, Transportation Planning, Building Inspections, Property Maintenance, Zoning, and Historic Preservation and Design. She has 20 years of experience as a community development professional and planner in both the public and private sectors. Previously she was a Comprehensive Planning supervisor in the Arlington County Planning Division, which included leadership for small area plans and Arlington County’s Missing Middle Housing Study.
Kellie is leading Charlottesville’s effort to develop an open-source housing design library in partnership with UVA — three permit-ready housing prototypes designed through community co-design, paired with the financial and policy tools to help low- and moderate-income residents use them.