The city has over 7,000 buildings and vacant lots in its possession. Many of them are on 25- and 30- foot lots, which, under the city’s regressive 1953 zoning law, are rendered unbuildable because of a 40-foot minimum lot width. Variances can be had, but not from the 5-foot side yard requirement if you are building with combustible siding. With a 25-foot lot, that would leave a person with a 15-foot wide house. Not all that bad, trust me.

But these days most everyone with the wherewithal to buy a house has bought a car first. Ergo, the city, with its Beaver Cleaver zoning ordinance, wants you to park it off the street. Figure another five feet on one side of the lot. That leaves room for a house 10 feet wide. That is a little tight.

Still active house of the mid-block, 'commercial' type.

Solution? A carefully designed firehouse or carriage house style house right up to the building line.

Firehouses and carriage houses are designed primarily for vehicular storage. They are much better to look at than the average garage because the public owner had to satisfy private neighbors, or a private owner had to look at his carriage house from his own breakfast nook. The result was building outlines and roof shapes which were dominant. The garage doors were secondary, recessed in the wall plan and often surmounted by a balcony or other controlling element. Further, the doors were treated as voids, like windows, and painted in dark colors.

Garage can be "flex" space as well. On 17h St., a former garage is used as photo studio.

The thing that works in old firehouses is the ground level interior parking and, sometimes, a ground level kitchen. The reason you don’t want to build parking pads in front of houses is that it looks like hell and cars are very intrusive of parking space, whether of a neighbor on a porch or a pedestrian on the street. A number of parking pads in a row is a recipe for declining real estate values (Witness Grant Street, or some of the double pads on Richmond Avenue). A parking pad is also bad for security reasons because an empty driveway fairly shouts that no one is home, whereas with street or garage parking no one is the wiser. This can be a problem in neighborhoods with idle people looking for mischief.

Many cities, notably Boston and San Francisco, have many new houses just like the firehouse model descried here. Street level garages can be part of a sociable, appealing streetscape. With rigorous design standards, Buffalo should encourage them as a means to fill in vacant lots.

San Francisco 2-unit house on sloping site