Throughout most of our country’s history, there was a wide variety of housing types and prices in most communities, and the tradition of placing homes close together was perceived to provide many positive benefits. While this tradition was interrupted for a period after the Second World War, there has been a resurgent interest in the mixed and compact housing patterns of older neighborhoods, to the point that many newer neighborhoods and homes are being built to resemble older ones. What people seem to like about both that old tradition and its new version is that one need not sacrifice a sense of privacy and security, or a loss of incivility, in order to gain the conveniences and public benefits of living in higher-density buildings or communities. A new generation of affordable and market-rate developers are using good site planning and building design to turn the act of living close into the art of living well. Looking at the pictures of compact housing here, most audiences find the images attractive. Can you tell which of these examples from an American city is an older development, and which is recent? Which is affordable and what is the market rate? The answer- upper left-hand image is a recent all-affordable low-income rental townhouse, the upper right is the turn of the century small lot Victorian homes, the lower left is a compact homeownership development with 15% low-income buyers, 85% market rate, the bottom right shows a 1920’s neighborhood with mixture of single-family homes, three-unit apartment building, and units over a corner store.