Interesting article on the Planetizen website this week by John D. Landis, Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania about the current housing affordability crisis.  What makes this article stand out is that it argues that the crisis is the result of a number of factors and trends, of which local land use regulation is only a part (and maybe not even that big a part).  Titled To Build More Housing, Cities Must Be Smarter in How They Use Land, it is definitely worth the read for those trying to come to grips with this pervasive issue.  I’m not saying it is the “real” answer, but it certainly makes you think about what might be actions that could be taken, and that the problem will not be quickly solved, if it ever will be.  Here’s some notable excerpts.

Landis begins by noting what many have said about the cause of the crisis:

How many new homes would zoning reform generate, and how quickly? The answer to this question is far from obvious. In most U.S. communities, zoning doesn’t directly limit the number of housing units built in a particular year. Rather, it works by regulating which housing types can be located on a given parcel. Modifying local zoning codes to enable developers to build more densely or making it easier to build “as-of-right” — without needing a variance or having to undergo an environmental review — would thus increase the number of housing units that could be built in a particular year. Or so the argument goes.

While this reasoning seems to make sense on its face, it oversimplifies …

Landis then uses an analysis of where housing shortages are most pronounced and compares that to the local and state regulatory environment:

Zoning and over-regulation are not the principal source of these deficits. Whereas housing production is significantly over-regulated in California… , it is only moderately regulated in Florida and New York and under-regulated in Texas. Indeed, … the relationship between regulatory stringency and state-level housing production is a relatively weak one.

Landis goes on to offer three reasons for the housing supply shortage (I only summarize the reasons here, there is much more detail about each point in the article):

The first is increasing concentration in the residential development and homebuilding industry. Data compiled by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing indicates that the share of new single-family homes constructed by the nation’s ten largest homebuilders increased from 19.7 percent in 2002 to 31.4 percent by 2018. Two public companies in particular, D.R. Horton and Lennar, dominate the market, ranking as the first or second largest homebuilder in a majority of the nation’s 50 largest metro areas as of 2019.

The second reason for the slowdown in new home construction is that until recently, homebuilders were building many fewer homes in advance of demand, or, as it is known in the industry, “building on spec.” This is a result of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction from what occurred in the years before the Great Recession when homebuilders turned out record numbers of new housing units in response to demand inflated by speculators seeking homes to resell or rent out. … When the market softened in 2006, homebuilders were caught with millions of unsold homes and unbuilt lots, many of which sat empty for years. The lesson builders learned from this fiasco was that it was generally safer to lag market demand than to lead it.

The third and biggest reason for the slowdown in new housing construction is a shift in where young adults prefer to live. From the 1950s until the mid-1990s, the demand for new housing was overwhelmingly concentrated in the suburbs where land for housing was plentiful and inexpensive, where federally subsidized highways provided near-ubiquitous access and mobility, where government-subsidized mortgages were widely available… .

He attributes this shift to the increasing unattractiveness of the suburbs, the move of major employers back into downtowns, and the revitalization of metropolitan cores.

To address the problem, Landis postulates that there are really three different types of communities, each of which requires a different approach.

Rather than blaming a broken regulatory process, a more constructive approach is to think about ways to unplug the land-to-housing pipeline. In some communities, let’s call them Type I places, the land-to-housing pipeline is too narrow, meaning there are not enough environmentally suitable development sites available to meet projected housing demand. This will require redeveloping surplus commercial sites into housing, upgrading existing home sites with additional units, and, where appropriate, upzoning to allow for increased densities.

In other places, sufficient land may be available to accommodate demand, but the current regulatory approvals process is too inflexible or ad hoc to facilitate their timely development. The land-to-housing pipeline in these Type II communities may be wide enough, but it’s as if there is a broken valve at its output end… .

Finally, there are communities in states … that have ample land for development and a smoothly functioning regulatory process but are periodically overwhelmed by the boom-bust character of the housing market and the difficulties of reviewing dozens of projects at once with little coordination. In this last Type III case, there’s nothing wrong with the land-to-housing pipeline other than it occasionally chokes on unexpected overflows.

Solutions?  Here’s where the land use processes of states and local communities are addressed by Landis (again, there is much more detail in the article than what I’ve excerpted here):

… with the Type I communities that are running out of easily developable land, the first place for them to look for additional housing sites is at vacant or obsolete shopping centers… .  What’s preventing more surplus shopping center sites from being converted to housing? The principal problem is that most are zoned for auto-oriented commercial uses rather than housing or mixed uses. This is easily correctable from a zoning perspective…

He also notes that in many older Type I communities, older housing consists of small homes on relatively large lots (Landis does acknowledge issues that may arise with infrastructure in such places).  Zoning could be changed to allow more than one dwelling on such lots, or new styles of dwellings (duplexes, triplexes, ADUs, etc).

As regards Type II and Type III communities—places that have sufficient developable land to meet their housing obligations but where, for one reason or another, the local entitlement process makes gaining needed permit approvals more difficult than necessary—here, the goal should be to better align the local approvals with best-practice planning and development principles.

In other words, making the regulatory process function better and more smoothly.

There’s lots to this piece, it certainly is thought-provoking.  Something everyone trying to wrestle with the housing affordability crisis should at least look over and consider.