Eli Kahn

Eli Kahn

Resources for Reformers: Single-Stair Midrise Buildings

As a sense of urgency builds around North America’s housing affordability crisis, researchers have begun to look beyond zoning and permitting for ways to build more housing for less money. In the wake of a movement to bring more mass timber buildings to the US and Canada, some have turned their attention to the role of building codes.  The first building code issue to receive sustained grassroots attention is the requirement, listed in the International Building Code (despite the name, a code mostly in use in the US), for buildings over three stories to have two exit staircases connected by a corridor. This requirement has long been in effect in most of the United States, with the exception of New York City, Seattle, and recently Honolulu and Knoxville (and a few other areas with modified versions of the requirement, as detailed in this Niskanen Center report.) Architect Sean Jursnick and developer Peter LiFari’s policy brief for Mercatus is a good general survey of the issue; for a discussion of local reforms that also interviews many of the key players, also read Patrick Sisson’s article in The Architect’s Newspaper.  State legislators in Tennessee, Washington, Oregon, California, Connecticut, Virginia, and Minnesota have passed legislation directing their states’ building councils to consider – or simply approve – single-stair buildings up to six stories. Bills to similar effect were also introduced but not passed last year in New York and Pennsylvania; this year, bills are being considered in Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, and Texas. Los Angeles city councilmember Nithya Raman has also introduced a motion to update the building code there, and Austin is debating such a motion as well. Mechanisms of reform A policy brief for HUD’s Cityscape journal by Stephen Smith of the Center for Building in North […]

Yes in God’s backyard… and yes up to three stories?

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. […]

Colorado housing reform wins in Round 2

Last year disappointed pro-housing advocates in Colorado, as Governor Polis’s flagship reform was defeated by the state legislature. But Polis and his legislative allies tried again this year, and yesterday the governor signed into law a package of reforms which cover much of the ground of last year’s ill-fated HB23-213. HB24-1152 is an ADU bill. It applies to cities with populations over 1000 within metropolitan planning areas (so, the Front Range – home to most of Colorado’s major cities – along with Grand Junction), and CDPs with populations over 10,000 within MPOs. Within those jurisdictions, the law requires the permitting of at least 1 ADU per lot in any zone that permits single-family homes, without public hearings, parking requirements, owner-occupancy requirements, or ‘restrictive’ design or dimensional standards. The law also appropriates funds available for ADU permit fee mitigation, to be made available to ADU-supportive jurisdictions which go beyond compliance with the law to make ADUs easier to build (including jurisdictions not subject to the law’s preemption provisions). HB24-1304 eliminates parking minimums for multifamily and mixed-use buildings near transit within MPOs (though localities can impose parking minimums up to 1 space per unit for buildings of 20+ units or for buildings with affordable housing, if they issue a fact-based finding showing negative impacts otherwise). This bill was pared down in the Senate and would originally have eliminated parking requirements within MPOs entirely. HB24-1313 is a TOD and planning obligations bill. The bill:– Designates certain localities as ‘transit-oriented’ (if they are within MPOs, have a population of 4,000+, and have 75+ acres total either within ¼ mile of a frequent transit route or within ½ mile of a transit station – in effect, 30 or so localities along the Front Range).– Assigns all transit-oriented communities (TOCs) housing opportunity goals, which are simply […]

YIMBY wins again in Vermont

On March 25, the city council of Burlington, VT, voted to pass a major zoning reform that one observer of Vermont politics (X.com’s pseudonymous @NotaBot) compared to the celebrated overhaul of Minneapolis’s zoning code. Burlington – the largest city in Vermont, at 45,000 inhabitants – has not escaped the housing crisis affecting the country. Burlington was an attractive destination for new residents during the pandemic and the rise of remote work; severe flooding last year put additional pressure on the housing supply. Policymakers statewide were well aware of the challenge and last year passed S.100, a sweeping package of housing reforms. Now Burlington, led by a pro-housing mayor, Miro Weinberger, has taken action at the local level. Burlington’s reform, known as the Neighborhood Code, is a welcome simplification of the city’s zoning. The Neighborhood Code eliminates the city’s ‘waterfront’ zoning districts and a ‘dense housing overlay’, adding a higher-density ‘residential corridor’ district, for a total of four residential zones. There are also significant increases in allowed density across the city. The Neighborhood Code allows up to fourplexes in all residential districts, allows townhouses everywhere but the low-density residential zone, and expands the option to create a cottage court or add a second freestanding unit on the same lot. The new code also limits requirements for minimum lot size, lot coverage, and setbacks. The reforms took some haircuts before final passage in response to pushback from organized groups of residents, but remain a meaningful change. In their report presenting the Neighborhood Code, Burlington’s city planning department reviews the city’s history. Planners explain that much of Burlington’s housing stock predates its zoning code, and in particular many existing lots are smaller than the official minimum lot size. Also, in Burlington’s first era of zoning, the city had a single residential district which […]

Unexpected correlation in Census housing data

Since 1973, the US Census Bureau has administered the American Housing Survey (AHS) in odd-numbered years. Surveyors ask questions about the quality and value of respondents’ housing, and have a battery of questions for the subset of respondents who moved recently, asking about their search process. The AHS regularly adds new questions and rephrases old ones from year to year.  In 2021, they rolled out a group of three new questions. One asks recent movers whether they spent more or less than a month searching for their new home. This is the AHS’s first-ever variable dealing with search time. The other two, which are similar to questions asked in previous years, ask about search scope: whether respondents looked for housing in neighborhoods besides the one they ended up moving to, and whether they looked at other housing units in the same neighborhood they moved to. In analyzing these new questions within the largest 15 metro areas in the US, I found a curious and hard-to-explain relationship. Search time – the binary variable of taking more or less than a month to look for a home – seems to be predicted by the population of a metropolitan area (with r=0.57 and p > |t| = 0.026), whereas search scope in the sense of looking at multiple neighborhoods or multiple units within a neighborhood seems to be predicted by the cost of housing as gathered from 2021 Zillow data (for looking at multiple neighborhoods, r=0.65 and p > |t| = 0.009; for looking at multiple units, r=0.68 and p > |t| = 0.007).  The inverse set of relationships are much weaker. Price and likelihood of taking over a month to search are positively correlated, but the relationship is not statistically significant; the same is true of the relationship between metro population and […]

New Report: Georgia Not Quite an Unregulated Paradise

In a recent report from the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Chris Denson and J. Thomas Perdue compile the strictest minimum lot size regulations and minimum home size regulations from a range of cities and counties in Georgia. 31 of Georgia’s 159 counties mandate minimum lot sizes (in unincorporated land, on some districts) larger than 1 acre, with minimums as high as 5 acres in two southwestern Georgia counties. Charting local zoning in America is no small task, and Denson and Perdue give a valuable snapshot of one of its facets in a big and growing state. Georgia is not known for onerous regulation of homebuilding – when I volunteered with Abundant Housing LA, a fellow volunteer who’d moved from Georgia would shame liberal NIMBYs by saying how much easier it was to get apartments permitted in her conservative home state – but like much of the US, Georgia’s home construction has failed to meet the growing demand. Denson and Perdue spotlight one specific regulatory tool more typical of Georgia than elsewhere: minimum home size regulations (as distinct from minimum lot size regulations, which are ubiquitous nationwide). Denson and Perdue show that Georgia counties and county seats often require minimum home sizes far in excess of American Society of Planning Officials benchmarks, and point out this drives up housing costs significantly. Below is a map (made in ArcGIS by my colleague Micah Perry) of Denson and Perdue’s data on county government minimum home sizes, showing the highest minimum in any zone on unincorporated land for counties for which data was available: The clear lesson from Georgia’s surprisingly strict regulations is that policymakers in growing Sun Belt cities and states shouldn’t delude themselves: the crises afflicting coastal “superstar” cities are coming for them too if they don’t liberalize land use laws. Austin […]

New Report on Massachusetts’s Building Code Confirms: It’s Harder to Build Energy-Efficient Housing When You Don’t Let People Build Anything

The state of Massachusetts lets municipal governments choose how strictly they regulate energy efficiency in buildings. Fifty-two of the state’s municipalities use the base building code, whereas 299, including Boston, have opted into the stricter “stretch” energy code. In addition to these two, the state recently rolled out an even stricter “specialized” stretch code in the interest of getting to net-zero carbon emissions faster. Cities could opt in to the specialized code as of last December; several municipalities have already opted in, and Boston may do so soon. The new code is technically the Municipal Opt-In Specialized Stretch Energy Code, and I considered referring to it hereinafter as MOISSEC, which is cute because it sounds like a wine, but I ended up deciding that the least confusing option is to follow official documents in referring to the new option as the specialized code, and refer to what is existing law in most of the state as the stretch code. Given that Massachusetts has some of the most expensive housing in the country, it’s reasonable to worry about the impact of any housing regulations on affordability, even when they serve an important objective. Massachusetts had the third highest cost of new housing of all states in 2021, and has unusually low housing supply, even among expensive coastal states. Research from the Boston Foundation details the extent of the problem: Greater Boston has lower vacancy rates than even Los Angeles or New York, homes spend less time on the market in Boston, and Boston is not on track to meet its housing production goals, though construction has increased somewhat in recent years. A new report released Tuesday by the MIT Center for Real Estate, the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts (HBRAMA), and Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT) projects the impact […]