The Live-Work Unit: Layout and material preconditions

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

There are reasons beyond developer inertia that true live-work units have not proliferated as society's need for them has expanded. Live-work production has not advanced as it should have, at a pace inversely corresponding to the recessional of the industrial age in North America. In good part, the market’s failure to respond to social and economic change is attributable to stifling codes and standards, and to an entrenched regime that never envisioned the workplace and the dwelling coexisting within the same building.

Usually such codes do not actually outlaw the live-work unit. In their received form, intended to control an earlier world, they merely make it in practice inefficient and expensive to build live-works. The principal constraints fall into three categories: first, disability standards; second, fire separation and egress codes; and third, of course, the perennial bugbear of parking requirements. Together and separately, these act counterproductively to answering market demand.