Kaid Benfield observes that a small number of developers, led by Third Street Cottages, have been experimenting with a new strategy for achieving higher density on small plots of land:

Third Street Cottages placed eight small homes around a shared common green, on about two-thirds of an acre in a walkable small town setting. To my eye, they look fantastic. To be sure, the small structures aren’t ideally sized for a large family, but their scale works for a significant part of the housing market, and the concept – a compact footprint around shared common space – can be and has been applied to groupings of larger homes that still conserve land and resources while increasing walkability.

Benfield argues that “pocket neighborhoods” have the virtue of being compatible with existing land-use patterns.

[I]t is a strategy that can be implemented incrementally on smaller pieces of land. In my world, people are always looking for the Huge Idea to produce Big Change. But that’s not the way things happen in the real world, especially when we are seeking to accommodate development in our existing cities and towns. The evolution of 21st century sustainable communities must be about infill development and replacement of outdated properties, generally one project at a time. The pocket neighborhood approach allows subtlety and sensitivity as we simultaneously add more people and live more compactly.

In the Denver area, for example, a number of abandoned shopping malls are being transitioned into modest-sized mixed-use mini-neighborhoods. This is not a frontal attack on “demon sprawl.” Rather, it is a modest effort to meet some of the pent-up demand for walkable urbanism in unconventional spaces. One can imagine pocket neighborhoods sprouting up in abandoned parking lots and other poorly-utilized spaces.