At the upcoming APA Utah Fall Conference in Ogden Sept. 28-29, on Friday afternoon, I’ll be moderating a panel discussion in a session about what we might expect from upcoming legislative sessions in Utah and Idaho on land use planning and regulation.  Many of the things that are being discussed fall into the characterization of zoning reform, such as it is, that has been happening the last few years all around the country, and even internationally.  And it seems that this “movement” is just gaining steam.

To prove the point, in addition to some of the things I’ve highlighted already in past blog entries, here are a couple more things that bear out that this effort at “reforming” land use regulation to enhance housing affordability is not anywhere near done yet.

First of course, is the blog entry posted just prior to this one, about the discussion of potentially making Utah a mandatory general plan consistency state.  See that post for the implications of that.

Next, I was just recently been made aware that Salt Lake County is going to resume their Regional Solutions Event this November.  These were started when I was with SL County, to help bring local officials and staffs together to learn about and share viewpoints on hot land use topics of the day.  Past topics have been on Parking (UCLA’s Donald Shoup was the keynote) and Missing Middle Housing (Dan Parolek was the keynoter), so they’ve been very good, very high level events.

Dina Blaes, SL County’s Director of the Office of Regional Development, just sent me the info about this year’s event, which will be Zoning Reform for Housing Attainability.  The main speakers will be Dr. Arnab Chakraborty, newly appointed Dean of the College of Architecture + Planning at the University of Utah; Dr. Chris Nelson, former Ute and now at the University of Arizona, whom we all know and respect; and Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic,  who I have said has become one of my favorite writers on the topic of zoning and land use reform (see several of the past blog posts).  This promises to be a great and timely event.

Finally, there is more and more being written about zoning reform in more mainstream publications, not just those specialized for land use practitioners.  To wit, a couple of weeks ago Forbes ago carried this: New Studies Provide Further Evidence That Zoning Reforms Work.  And just today I saw in the international section of The Economist  this story: The New Zing in Zoning: The Growing Global Movement to Restrain House Prices.  The story is paywalled, so let me pull out some of the more interesting observations made about zoning reform from it.

In stating the problem, the story says:

In recent decades house prices have outstripped income growth across the developed world. The reasons for this are numerous. Interest rates affect how much buyers can afford, as does income growth. Population changes, culture and demography all have an impact on demand, as do bank regulation, lending practices and the like. But underlying it all is basic economic logic: where demand outpaces the supply of new homes, prices tend to rise.
Zoning and planning laws … are so strict that building new housing is in many places completely illegal, and in almost all it is slow, difficult and expensive.

California has tried to control development since at least the 1970s. Scott Wiener, a state senator who represents San Francisco, says that with housing in the state “the rules get made up as you go along”. The process “takes years and years and is so chaotic it ultimately mutilates or kills the project entirely”. Mr Wiener was among the first yimby politicians and crafted a new state law, sb35, which passed not long after he took office in 2017.  sb35 encourages more development by forcing reluctant city governments to comply with state-led targets … in order to facilitate new housing.

As this story is in the international section of the magazine, this observation bears that out:

In New York this year Kathy Hochul, the state governor, (unsuccessfully) proposed a radical “upzoning”, approving a greater density of housing in a particular area. She argued that it would allow the construction of 800,000 more homes over a decade, primarily by letting more apartments be built around railway stations in New York City’s suburbs. In Canada Pierre Poilievre, who leads the opposition Conservative Party, wants the federal government to be able to force municipalities to allow more housing construction. Both major political parties in Britain say they want more houses built, no doubt mindful of an election expected next year.
Yet constructing housing remains extremely tricky. The problem, says Brian Hanlon, a co-founder of California yimby, a pro-housing pressure group, is that “we are all inheritors of this English town-planning system, which is disastrous”. In Britain the first extensive regulation of landowners’ rights to build on their property was introduced with the Town Planning Act in 1909 and then expanded dramatically in 1947 with the Town and Country Planning Act. In America “zoning” laws were passed in most urban areas in the 1920s and 1930s.

The crux of the problem?

In San Francisco construction cost on average around $440 per square foot last summer (a figure far higher than elsewhere in America). But homes sold for roughly twice that. In southern England an acre of agricultural land might cost as much as £15,000 ($19,000). An acre with planning permission is worth at least 60 times that. What this means is that giving permission to developers to build creates vast amounts of value by the stroke of a pen. And yet it doesn’t happen, largely because, through the planning system, local residents and political groups are generally able to block any development. Rules intended to regulate development, such as environmental reviews, design consultations, parking requirements and so on, in fact serve the purpose of stopping it.

Can zoning reform make a difference?

Housing construction has risen in California in recent years: more homes were built in the state last year than in any since 2008. Some of this is thanks to modest yimby reforms. In the Los Angeles area, there has been a boom in the construction of accessory dwelling units. Typically, these are built in the garden of an existing house. Statewide, around 60,000 have been permitted since 2017 and in 2022 they made up one in seven of all homes constructed; most of them have been put up in the Los Angeles area.  Overall construction is still far too low to make California truly affordable again, however. The big question is whether recent reforms can induce more.

Activists point to one place where it has already had a measurable and large effect. In 2016 New Zealand’s parliament passed a sweeping upzoning of the city of Auckland. The result, says Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy, an economist at the University of Auckland who has analysed the data, was a big increase in building. The number of new homes that got permission to be built went up from 2,500 to 15,000 between 2010 and 2021.

The story is worth the read, there’s lots more about YIMBYism and land use reform efforts.

What all this indicates to me is, as we originally titled the APA Utah conference session, it ain’t over yet!  We’re going to see more proposals to “reform” land use processes and policies in our state legislatures.  We just need to make sure we’re part of that conversation.