A recent piece in Bloomberg CityLab titled “Effective Zoning Reform Isn’t as Simple as it Seems” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-24/the-limits-of-ending-single-family-zoningpoints out the complexity of attempting to achieve housing affordability by just eliminating single-family zoning. In fact, the writers point out, there are other local regulatory and policy measures that are likely more effective.
Minneapolis is the poster child for these conclusions.
Consider the example of Minneapolis, which voted to effectively eliminate single-family zoningcitywide in 2019, allowing landowners to build two- and three-unit apartment buildings on land previously off limits to anything other than individual homes. … Unfortunately, evidence thus far points to little progress … . Between 2018 and 2021, according to city data, permits for small apartment buildings doubled, but only to 81 total housing units in those types of structures — a tiny figure in the context of the city’s 180,000 households. At the same time, prices for single-family homes on lots affected by the zoning change increased.
The explanation for this underwhelming performance is in part due to the push from neighborhoods to impose substantial restrictions on the characteristics of now-allowed apartments. They
were required to be less than three stories tall and have small overall square footage … Acquiring financing for these types of structures is notoriously difficult.
Instead, it appears that other changes to the city’s development regulations have produced a better outcome:
The city legalized accessory dwelling units in 2015, eliminated parking requirements near frequent transit service in 2015, and dropped parking requirements citywide in 2021, making it cheaper to add apartments outside of downtown. As a result, the number of housing units permitted in Minneapolis doubled from 2015 to 2020. More than 90% of new units were in large buildings with at least 10 units.
The authors go on to postulate that it is really the addressing of a variety of policies and regulations that really results in the kind of changes striven for.
- flexibility measures allowing cities and towns to provide relief or exemptions to certain developers but not others;
- requirements, exactions and incentives, which are all tools used to promote certain types of development over others;
- administration rules that govern zoning policy; and
- procedures, such as the review and appeals processes used to make choices about advancing projects.
The article also makes the point that communities are often at very different places in their current makeup, future developability, and future course.
… requirements for outcomes and reforms should be tailored to jurisdictions’ local conditions. Much of the real-estate market responds not just to land-use regulations, but also to factors outside local government control.
The piece concludes it takes a full range of measures to effectively deal with something as complex as overall community character.
Minneapolis shows that eliminating single-family zoning alone — or altering other forms of base zoning — is not a silver bullet to increasing housing supply. Such changes are a small part of a wider transformation needed to improve communities’ land-use regulations to support housing production.
Eliminating single-family zoning isn’t enough if disgruntled neighbors can hold up construction on three-unit apartment buildings through months of public review. Allowing more types of housing to be built isn’t enough if unreasonable impact fees or parking requirements on new housing makes financing projects infeasible. Aligning all elements of land-use policy is necessary to make meaningful progress.
And then there are all those other little things beyond the community’s control, like cost of land, cost of materials, builder labor availability, financing and interest rates…. Oh well, you do what you can!