I like to keep an eye on the professional blog space. Partially because I went to a school in DC, and also because I like hearing about the world around me. One idea that has grabbed hold in the policy talk space has been the need to abolish single family zoning, engage in large scale upzoning, or abolishing zoning regulation entirely. This idea has been floating around land use policy for a while (I would say both Chuck Marohn and Emily Hamilton would put their names forward as individuals who were early adopters of upzoning); but I think the real breakthrough point came when the Color of Law and Golden Gates – written by Dr. Richard Rothstein and Conor Dougherty respectively – brought the racist origins of zoning in the United States to a wide audience. As a result, abolishing single family zoning, upzoning, and missing middle housing has become a pet policy amongst policy pundits.
Some of these pundits have noted (with varying levels of smugness) that traditionally low-income housing supporters have been on the opposite side of these debates. This has led to no small amount of skirmishing between traditional low-income housing organizations and younger, YIMBY organizations. Miriam Axel-Lute published a fantastic recent history of the disagreements between YIMBY groups and other housing advocacy groups that I would recommend if you would like a full account of this history[1].
Reading these exchanges, I’m reminded of the New York Times Podcast by Chana Joffe-Walt, Nice White Parents. Joffe-Walt’s reporting documents two periods in history of a school in Brooklyn, NY. In both cases, a majority-minority school is changed (in location and extracurriculars) by the advocacy of white parents. The parents themselves are certain of their moral belief that the changes they were pushing for would address racial equity in addition to benefitting their own children[2].
As Chaffe-Waltz noted, while the white parents got their way, the benefits were unlikely to accrue to the Non-White students. And the policy changes to benefit the non-white students never seemed to materialize because the white parents would move on.
This dynamic I think is worth noting in the fact that it mirrors in many was how housing policy has played out over the years. Take for example, this excerpt from Alexander von Hoffman’s chronicle of the the various housing acts of the depression era:
“The housing laws passed during the Roosevelt administration created what Radford calls a two-tiered federal housing policy. At the higher tier, the government provided help to private industry to develop housing for the middle classes, at first primarily by insuring mortgages and organizing a mortgage market as authorized by the Housing Act of 1934. These programs encouraged building at the periphery, thus helping to drain the urban core of the middle classes. At the lower tier, the government built housing for low-income people. But as Catherine Bauer pointed out, as long as public housing was known as a poor people’s program, it would never be popular or have strong political support, which is why she insisted on a broad-based public housing program (Cole 1975; Radford 1996).” [3]
This notes a cycle in which the educated, mostly white, well off populace will consistently drive policy with far greater control. This inevitably leads to policy that benefits them, while more difficult and critical reforms that benefit lower income and Non-White communities are dropped. This is not to say that those pushing for zoning and housing reform are wrong. I would argue in both cases (education and housing policy) that the reform proponents are correct in diagnosing that the US has systematically disinvested and blocked Non-White communities from being able to access affordable quality education and housing. There is compelling evidence that increasing housing supply can have an impact on the rents of moderate-income housing[4]. Therefore, upzoning and changing discretionary processes is an experiment worth trying. However, it is necessary that these reforms be paired with reforms that also address low-income and Non-White communities as well. These include rental protection policies, investments in social housing, and increasing the enforcement of fair housing laws. And I believe YIMBYs are supportive of these reforms. The CA YIMBY legislative platform for example has rental protections and additional funding for low-income housing as two of its five objectives[5].
So why write this article? Because my fear is that what we will see is a repeat of the 1930s. Deregulation and government support for middle-income housing solutions will lower enthusiasm for the harder investments in social housing and tenant protections that have far more entrenched interest groups (anti-tax activists, landlords, and others) than NIMBYs. As cities begin to move to upzone single family residential zones and state laws around the country promote by-right development[6], we haven’t seen particular interest in boosting funding for affordable development, nor a public push to support renters. While there is a bill in California that promotes social housing[7], funding for the concept hasn’t followed suit. Similarly, at the federal level there is enthusiasm for incentivizing the end of single-family zoning, but little appetite to pursue new methods of financing affordable housing[8] or increasing enforcement of anti-discrimination or providing support to tenant organizations[9].
These outcomes demonstrate an implicit value judgement between policies. If we have to pick between upzoning and tenant protection, we should pick upzoning every time. And I understand that urge. There is far more research on the impact of upzoning and housing supply than there is on tenant protections and their impact. Partially this has to do with the disciplines most interested in each – evictions and tenants’ rights tends to be of interest to sociologists and qualitative researchers while housing supply is very much something economists speak about – but I think beyond that there is a knee jerk reaction that tenant protections are something that you only need if the housing market is not working properly. And that in “healthy” markets, there is a disincentive to behave with discrimination or ill intent. And so, if we believe we can only get one policy through, better to get the policy that will get to the outcome that produces the most tangible results.
This logical argument is pretty strong, especially given how difficult it can be to make any movement on housing policy. However, I think there are two points, which I do believe bear some consideration. First, that land, and more specifically, the control of land, is a key piece of the housing market. A fantastic study of Portland upzoning between 2000-2017 noted that the impact of upzoning was far more effective when applied to vacant or underutilized parcels rather than parcels which had been developed[10]. This means that we need to be realistic of the timeframe of our interventions and also consider how effective our intervention will be in various contexts. While upzoning can provide more housing, the age of housing stock, the ease of parcel assembly (in the case of multifamily/infill development), construction labor and material supply, as well as the previous use mean that new housing as a result of upzoning could have a 30-year time horizon. To really make up this housing deficit, particularly with low-income housing; sustained public investment will be required. Additionally, we need to be vigilant to the pressure of landlords to ‘redevelop’ their affordable housing as the result of upzoning.
The second concern is that housing is a manifestation of identity as much as it is a good. There have been fantastic works of ethnography about how homes are core to identity formation; and that fights over space are as much about culture as they are about home value[11]. Tenant protections and fair housing laws play a critical role in ensuring that new housing is not only accessible, but also that space is opened up to more than just white conceptions of space and housing. This will require modes of planning participation that move beyond public participation during plan creation and permit processes to continual proactive planning to help communities manage change and address issues. Planners should not only see their role being the regulation of land use, but the facilitators of community conversations and the proactive creation of inclusive space.
I realize this complicates the more simplified message of “end single family zoning” or “build more housing now”, but I think long term; a more nuanced message will lead to policies that are more effective at addressing housing issues. By presenting upzoning, tenant protections, and social housing funding as a package of reforms that complement each other, it places the onus on policy makers to actually deliver on all of them, as opposed to picking one to “prove” they are doing something. Otherwise, I believe that as we will continue to be plagued by housing issues while not having the political support to address housing comprehensively.
[1] Miriam Axel-Lute, “YIMBYs: Friend, Foe, or Chaos Agent?,” Shelterforce (blog), February 19, 2019, https://shelterforce.org/2019/02/19/yimbys-friend-foe-or-chaos-agent/.
[2] Chana Joffe-Walt, “Nice White Parents,” n.d., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-parents-serial.html.
[3] Alexander von Hoffman, “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 2 (January 2000): 299–326, https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2000.9521370.
[4] Kate Pennington, “Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement?: The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco,” January 2021, 67; Xiaodi Li, “Do New Housing Units in Your Backyard Raise Your Rents?,” October 2019, 58.
[5] “Policy and Legislation,” California YIMBY (blog), accessed June 25, 2021, https://cayimby.org/policy/.
[6] Chris Nichols, “Sacramento Could Be One Of First Cities To Reform Single-Family Home Zoning. Here’s How It Would Work.,” accessed June 25, 2021, https://www.capradio.org/162882; “Oregon Strikes Exclusive Single-Family Zoning, But Effects May Take Years,” opb, accessed June 25, 2021, https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-single-family-zoning-law-effect-developers/; “How Minneapolis Became the First to End Single-Family Zoning | PBS NewsHour Weekend,” accessed June 25, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-minneapolis-became-the-first-to-end-single-family-zoning; Wyatt Gordon, Virginia Mercury May 26, and 2021, “Can Virginia Legislate Away the NIMBYs?,” Virginia Mercury (blog), May 26, 2021, https://www.virginiamercury.com/2021/05/26/can-virginia-legislate-away-the-nimbys/.
[7] “Assemblyman Alex Lee’s New ‘Social Housing’ Bill Would Put State in Development Business,” San Jose Inside, February 11, 2021, https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/assemblyman-alex-lees-new-social-housing-bill-would-put-state-in-development-business/.
[8] “What Is the Faircloth Amendment?,” accessed June 25, 2021, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/what-is-the-faircloth-amendment.
[9] Josh Cohen, “HUD Has Money for Tenant Organizing. Why Isn’t the Agency Spending It?,” Shelterforce (blog), March 19, 2021, https://shelterforce.org/2021/03/19/hud-has-money-for-tenant-organizing-why-isnt-the-agency-spending-it/.
[10] Hongwei Dong, “Exploring the Impacts of Zoning and Upzoning on Housing Development: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis at the Parcel Level.,” Journal of Planning Education and Research, February 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X21990728.
[11] Kathryn Howell, “Long-Term Residents and Their Relationships to Gentrification in Washington, DC,” 2015, 24; Willow Lung-Amam, Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Rev. and expanded ed (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).