Missing middle · The supply strategy
Townhomes, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and condominiums. Marion County has 264,000 single-family houses and 9,356 duplex parcels. If we want more homes and lower prices, this is the fastest and least expensive place to get them.
Between a detached house on its own lot and a large apartment building sits everything most American neighborhoods were built out of before 1940, and almost nothing built since.
Townhome
1 unit, attached. Shares side walls, owns its own lot and front door. The cheapest form of ownership housing there is.
Duplex
2 units. Two homes, one building. An owner can live in one side and rent the other, which is how a first house gets paid for.
Triplex and fourplex
3 or 4 units. Reads as a large house from the street. Four families on the land that holds one.
Courtyard building
5 to 9 units. Two or three storeys around a shared yard. Still wood frame, still no elevator, still walk-up.
Condominium
Owned, not rented. The same buildings, sold by the unit instead of rented. The only way most of this becomes ownership housing.
What these share is why they are cheap. Wood frame instead of steel and concrete. Walk-up instead of an elevator. Surface parking or a driveway instead of a structured garage. Built by small local builders on single lots, not by national capital on assembled land. A fourplex costs a fraction per home of what a mid-rise costs, and it can go up on a vacant lot that already has water, sewer and a street in front of it.
They also fit where we need them. A Reinvestment tract on the east side is full of 30 and 40 foot platted lots with the infrastructure already paid for. That lot will never hold an apartment building. It will hold a duplex.
Marion County has 441,040 housing units. The middle is 16 percent of them, and most of that is old.
Gold bars are the missing middle. Census American Community Survey, 2020 to 2024, table B25024. Bar length is relative to detached single-family.
The Assessor's parcel records tell the same story from the ownership side. Marion County has 264,216 single-family residential parcels and 19,207 condominium parcels, against 9,356 two-family parcels and 316 three-family parcels. Three hundred sixteen. In a county of nearly a million people.
This is not a market preference. Duplexes and fourplexes were normal here, and then the zoning code made them illegal or discretionary on most residential land, and we built almost none for two generations. The stock we have is largely pre-war. When people say the market does not want this product, what they mean is the market has not been allowed to try.
These are one strategy, not two. A published abatement earned by right is what makes a small building pencil, and the middle is where a published abatement does the most good per dollar.
The schedule
100% for ten years
An owner-occupied two-to-four unit building gets the full abatement on the value it creates, in any zone, including zones where a detached house would get 75 percent or nothing at all.
Why owner occupancy
The rent pays the mortgage
A household that could not carry a $400,000 house can carry a $400,000 duplex, because the other unit pays a share of it. This is the oldest wealth-building machine in American cities and we zoned it out.
Why by right
Small builders cannot wait
A national homebuilder can absorb a year of hearings. The person building one fourplex cannot. Certainty is worth more to them than the money, and it costs the city nothing to give.
What it produces
Rental without a landlord from out of state
Every owner-occupied fourplex is three rental homes whose owner lives on site. Compare that to the accountability problem on the accountability page.
Cincinnati already gives extra abated value to two-to-four unit missing-middle projects, so there is precedent for writing it exactly this way. And the money lands harder here than on a house: because rental property is capped at 2 percent of value instead of 1 percent, an abatement on a fourplex delivers about 72 percent of its face value against 38 percent on a homestead. That is roughly $83,000 over ten years on a $520,000 fourplex, and $3,526 per home per year on an apartment building. The arithmetic is on the abatement page.
Money is rarely the first obstacle. Four other things kill these buildings before a lender is ever called.
The honest version, without a projection I cannot defend.
Marion County permitted 1,342 housing units in 2025. The region needs roughly 8,400 a year by the regional planning organization's 2024 estimate. Nobody is closing that gap with fourplexes alone, and I am not going to claim they will.
What I will claim is the arithmetic of where the next thousand homes are cheapest. There are more than 19,000 vacant platted residential lots in this county, most of them in neighborhoods where the streets and sewers already exist and a detached house will not pencil. Putting two to four homes on a lot instead of one, with a published abatement and a permit-ready plan, is the lowest-cost new supply available to us. It needs no land assembly, no structured parking, no state money, and no new department.
A count of how many of those vacant lots actually meet lot-width and frontage standards for a two-to-four unit building, and what a duplex costs per square foot here against a detached house. The first is a mapping exercise on data the city already holds. The second should come from builders, not from me.
What this means for you
Pick who you are in the bar at the top and this section changes.
The three questions I need answered: what does a fourplex cost per unit here against a detached house, what lot width do you actually need, and would a published plan set plus by-right permitting get you to build one this year. If the answer is that condo exposure makes ownership impossible, say that too.
Appraisals are the quiet killer here. If there are no recent sales of small multifamily in a neighborhood, the appraisal comes in low and the loan fails. Tell me how bad the comparable-sales problem is in the Reinvestment tracts, because if it is the binding constraint then the abatement is not the first fix.
The pre-reviewed plan sets are the single highest-leverage thing on this page. A fourplex that fits a 40-foot platted lot, meets the code without a variance, and can be financed by a household at area median income is the drawing the whole strategy waits on.
Owner-occupied two-to-four unit is a conventional product with well-understood underwriting, and rental income counts. What I want to know is where it breaks locally: appraisal comparables, construction lending for a builder doing one building, or condominium project approval.
A fourplex where the owner lives in one unit produces three rentals with an on-site owner, at a cost per home well below new construction elsewhere. If your model can hold the land or the ground lease under that, the combination reaches deeper than either tool alone.
This is not about towers. It is about buildings that look like large houses and were normal on Indianapolis streets a century ago. If there is a vacant lot on your block, the realistic choice is a duplex or nothing, not a duplex or a single-family house.
The code review the state requires by January 1, 2027 is the opening. Two-to-four unit by right with objective standards, no parking minimum near transit, and the abatement schedule attached is one coherent package, and the hearing to do it is already on our calendar by law.