With state legislative seasons in full swing, a picture of the landscape of land use reform is emerging. One dynamic I’ve been tracking: Yes In God’s Back Yard (YIGBY) bills, designed to allow religious organizations (and sometimes other nonprofits) to easily use their land to build housing, are still in vogue with lawmakers.
Salim Furth and I predicted last year that this year would be a key test for this policy area. While it would be a mistake to expect YIGBY to solve the housing crisis on its own, these bills can broaden the housing abundance coalition and let reluctant state lawmakers take a first step into preemption of local zoning ordinances.
So far, YIGBY bills have been proposed in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Washington state. In fact, this year’s bills seem to be converging on (at least part of) the framework for YIGBY legislation that Furth and I proposed. Our framework would let organizations build to a specified development intensity everywhere, as well as to the development intensity of the surrounding neighborhood if it’s denser than that base density.
Arizona’s HB 2191, for instance, specifies:
B. The height requirements for an allowed use development on an eligible site must meet one of the following:
1. Be not more than thirty-eight feet and three full floors.
2. Be the maximum height allowable by the current municipal zoning regulations for retail, office, residential or mixed use.
3. be not more than the height of a previously existing structure on the eligible site.
4. be not more than the height of any existing building within one-fourth mile of the eligible site, except for buildings developed pursuant to this section.
Clauses C and D set similar limits for setbacks and maximum lot coverage, followed by (emphasis mine):
E. A municipality may not impose any additional restrictions on an allowed use development on an eligible site other than the restrictions provided in subsections a, b, c and d of this section.
I think this is a positive sign for a reason I hadn’t considered before. Not only can YIGBY be a cautious lawmaker’s first foray into local zoning preemption, it might also inculcate those lawmakers into the school of Here’s One Thing You Can Definitely Build, which I’m starting to think is the secret to good YIMBY legislation.
In California, SB 9, which was designed to end single-family-home-only zoning statewide, has yet to yield large numbers of new housing units. Terner Center research on SB 9 implementing ordinances from 2022 flagged local governments’ “significant discretion on the additional regulations that they can impose on SB 9 projects”.
My guess is the most successful housing abundance laws (at least, while we wait for a majority coalition in favor of abolishing all zoning) will be the ones which define types of housing which developers know can go up anywhere in the state, without needing to invest in locally specific knowledge of zoning and procedure.
These YIGBY bills might not rise to that challenge even if they pass – the bottlenecks to housing production might come more from the permitting process than the regulations on the books, and developers in Arizona will still need to track which choices local governments make within the options HB 2191 allows. But it’s significant to see lawmakers embrace One-Thing-You-Can-Definitely-Build Thought. State legislators, especially in states with a less established YIMBY movement, are often very wary of preempting local land use regulation. The model established by bills like HB 2191 – “pick one of these regulations; don’t use any others” – might get those legislators acclimated to curbing local zoning in more specific terms than they’ve been comfortable with so far.
