In Escaping the Housing Trap, Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges address the role of zoning in creating the housing crisis. Like some other recent books (most notably by Nolan Gray and Bryan Caplan) this book shows how zoning limits housing supply and thus has led to our current housing crisis. But unlike Gray and Caplan, Marohn and Herriges focus on modest, politically feasible reforms rather than on the benefits of total deregulation.
Like other authors, Marohn and Herriges discuss the history of downzoning. For example, in Somerville, Mass., a middle-class suburb of Boston with 80,000 residents, only 22 houses conform to the city’s own zoning code. And in San Francisco, 54 percent of homes are in buildings that could not legally be built today. In Manhattan, 40 percent of buildings are nonconforming. Why? Because zoning has become steadily more restrictive over time, making new housing difficult to build.
Where development occurs, it is in a tiny fraction of the region’s neighborhoods- usually, either at the outermost fringe of suburbia or in a few dense urban neighborhoods. For example, in Hennepin County, Minnesota (Minneapolis and its inner suburbs) 75 percent of all housing units built between 2014 and 2019 were in 11 percent of the county’s neighborhoods. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio (Cleveland and its inner suburbs) 75 percent of housing units were built in under 5 percent of the county’s neighborhoods.
Marohn and Herriges also critique some anti-housing arguments. For example, one common argument is that only public housing is useful, because the very poor will never be served by the market. They correctly respond that even if there will always be some people in need of government assistance, adequate housing supply will reduce that number. They write that housing policy “will look very different in a situation where the market is failing to serve 5% of people with adequate housing versus a situation where the market is failing 20% or 30%. In the latter scenario, choices get harder, resources more strained, and decisions about funding priorities become more painful and zero-sum.” (p. 136) They further note that Vienna’s widely-praised program of extensive public housing is infeasible without tax increases; the program is funded through a local income tax, and cannot easily be copied in the U.S. because Vienna’s municipal government owns an ample amount of land.
Like Gray and Caplan, the authors are basically YIMBYs*- that is, they favor less zoning and more housing. But they are skeptical about the ability of the market as currently structured to provide a significant amount of housing, In particular, they quote one developer’s statement that “There are only so many towers and multifamily things we can build. There’s a limit to the workforce, permitting, the availability of cranes.” But I’m not sure why there should be a fixed supply of construction workers or cranes; presumably, manufacturers would make more cranes if demand was adequate, and employers could hire and train more construction workers.
So the authors favor a strategy of “incremental development”- that no neighborhood should experience radical change, but every neighborhood would allow modest change. For example, they write that “for a neighborhood of single-family homes, the next increment must include duplexes and backyard cottages.” (p. 157)
But this argument makes me wonder: if reliance on large-scale developers won’t produce enough housing units to keep costs down, why would reliance on homeowners’ willingness to build a duplex here and there?
The authors suggest that South Bend, Indiana, is an appropriate role model. In South Bend, government introduced pre-approved building templates to make small-scale development easier, and creates technical assistance for small-scale developers. But if I read Census data correctly, it seems like about 6 percent of South Bend’s housing has been added since 2010- not a terrible result, but not a significantly higher number than other Indiana cities like Bloomington, Fort Wayne and Evansville.
Marohn and Herriges have proposed a program of modest improvements- and this program might be the best option that is politically feasible in most of North America. But is this program strong enough to bring rents down? I doubt it.
*YIMBY is an acronym for “Yes In My Back Yard” and is often used to describe people who favor more housing.
