A natural zoning experiment in Denver: These two homes straddle a 2010 zoning boundary change. The result: The house in duplex zoning converted into two homes, and the other converted into a McMansion that cost 80% more.

Arthur Gailes, AEI

This is from AEI’s housing supply case study of Denver, by Tobias Peter and Hanlu Zhang.

The post Living on the edge appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Well, until last week it was not that dramatic. East Milton is an old railroad-commuter neighborhood favored by affluent Boston Irish. It’s separated from the City of Boston by the Neponset River estuary and from the rest of Milton by a sunken interstate highway that makes it more congested and big-city than the rest of town.

MBTA Communities

In January 2021, Massachusetts passed the first transit-oriented upzoning law of the YIMBY era, now called “MBTA Communities,” “MTBA-C”, or “Section 3A”. Implementing regulations assigned a multifamily zoning capacity to each town.

Milton was always going to be one of the toughest cases for MBTA Communities. The northern edge of town is served by the Mattapan Trolley, which John Adams rode to the Boston Tea Party links up to the Red Line at Ashmont. The trolley makes Milton a “rapid transit community”, which means it has to zone for multifamily units equal to 25% of its housing stock. Among the dozen towns in the rapid transit category, Milton is the only one where less than a quarter of current housing units are multifamily; it also has few commercial areas to upzone.

East Milton dissents

East Milton voters went to the polls on Wednesday and led a referendum rebuke of the plan. In Ward 7, it wasn’t close: 82% opposed the rezoning.
The Boston Globe offered a helpful breakdown of the surprisingly varied voting:

There are several hypotheses as to why the neighborhood went against rezoning so hard, all probably played a role.

• East Milton was assigned more than half the net new
  multifamily zoning capacity despite lacking good transit access.
• The neighborhood has been in a contentious, multiyear planning/suing process, so at least some residents were defensive and organized at the outset.
• It’s a very townie neighborhood. Growing up, I took it as a given that anybody who lived near me was Irish Catholic. Not being one myself, I didn’t quite belong. As a whole, the town is 16% Black, but East Milton is just rounding-error Black.

These reasons do not excuse East Milton. Its net multifamily zoning addition is so large because it has allowed so little multifamily housing in the past. The paucity of Black residents certainly suggests that prospective movers feel unwelcome.

Eliot Street YIMBYS

The real man-bites-dog story in Wednesday’s vote isn’t in East Milton. It’s along the street named for the Puritan apostle, which parallels the trolley tracks. The town’s plan (map, ordinance) put as much of the upzoning as possible into commercial or already-multifamily parcels. What was left was absorbed by Eliot Street and Blue Hills Parkway, plus some side streets.

The Neponset River in this section divides a 70% white census tract from a 95% non-white one surrounding Mattapan station. In my teen years, I remember a desultory movement to have the Capen Street trolley stop closed out of concern for crime. I expected these residents to vote no: theirs were the only houses being rezoned, and they live at the bleeding edge of a stark color and culture line.

The plan rezoned these single-family neighborhoods to allow 3 units per 7,500 square foot lot, up to 2.5 stories. Few, if any houses would be worth scraping, but some might be subdivided.

On Wednesday, the ward including Eliot Street voted 67%-33% in favor. The wards on each side of Blue Hills Parkway were also in favor. I don’t have a theory of the case. One person I spoke to pointed out that it’s a more progressive neighborhood. Another obvious aspect is that people here bought a home along a trolley line – they knew they were living in a city.

Who is the town?

Despite Eliot Street, “the town” failed to abide by MBTA-C. But who, exactly, failed? Is the town its staff? They worked exceptionally hard to comply. Is it the elected council, the Select Board? It complied. Or the representative town meeting members? They voted for the compliant plan 158-76.

But a state law allows voters to appeal the decision of a representative town meeting if they gather enough signatures. They did. In the resulting referendum, “the town” rejected “the town’s” decision.

Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy

I recently finished Lisa Belkin’s Show Me a Hero. You can take it as a tale about the racism or classism run amok, depending on which side you take. But I see it as a story about local democracy. The ruling in United States v. City of Yonkers didn’t just deconcentrate public housing, it also delegitimized a local democracy. The judge refused to make the hard decisions himself – he forced the city’s elected council to do so.

Whatever you may think of Milton, it is one of the world’s oldest continually-functioning democracies (362 years). It maintained its own militia and welfare system a century before the Declaration of Independence.

Democracies – local or sovereign – should not be omnipotent. Constitutional checks are vital at the top; hierarchical checks put guardrails around locals. Some areas of law are rightly outside local jurisdiction and the state can overrule a town.

But as Attorney General Andrea Campbell decides how to punish Milton for its failure to comply, she should keep in mind that no individual voter or representative should be forced to change his vote. The town can be overruled, but its democracy should not be mocked.

The post Milton’s Zoning Referendum appeared first on Market Urbanism.

In particular, the book’s third section on reforms is outstanding. It starts with a slate of policy proposals typical to this kind of text, but quickly goes much farther afield. After suggested policy changes, we’re invited to consider a world without zoning via an in-depth look at Houston’s land use regime. Here we’re treated to both an explanation of how it works and the unique political history that left the city unsaddled with zoning. Nolan goes on to close his recommendations with a call to reimagine what a city planner could be in a post-zoning American city; a call that, as a former New York City planner, he is uniquely fit to make.

Aside from the content, this book deserves points for prose. Arbitrary Lines is blessedly readable. The writing flows and the varied anecdotes interspersed throughout the book make it feel less like a policy tract and more like a conversation with your favorite professor during office hours.

For those already initiated, buy the book and enjoy nodding your head and learning a couple new things. And for those trying to share the good news of land use reform, consider making Arbitrary Lines that one thing you get friends or family to read. It’s among the most accessible books on land use I’ve ever read, and it’s a great addition to the growing arcana of the YIMBY cannon.

The post Book Review: Arbitrary Lines – How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It appeared first on Market Urbanism.

This seems like a public necessity – but even here the long arm of big government seeks to smash affordability. The article notes that Columbus, Ohio “passed an ordinance that subjects them to many of the same regulations as apartments” because “The hotels had an unfair competitive advantage.” In other words, the city is basically rewarding landlords for turning out bad-credit tenants, and punishing the hotels who seek to house them.

The post Local iniquity appeared first on Market Urbanism.

This video and its logic are impressively wrong, for several reasons.
First, I’ve been to Houston and most of what I saw looks nothing like the video – there are plenty of blocks dominated by houses and the occasional condo.

Second, most of the photos in the video could have easily happened in a zoned city, because one block in a neighborhood could be residential and the next block could be commercial, so the commercial or industrial activities can be easily viewable from the residential areas (not that anything is wrong with that).

Third, most other automobile-dependent cities aren’t any prettier than Houston; a strip mall in Houston doesn’t look any worse than a strip mall in Atlanta.

Fourth, it completely overlooks the negative side effects of zoning as it is practiced in most of the United States (many of which have been addressed more than once on this site). Typically, residential zones are so enormous that most of their residents cannot walk to a store or office. Moreover, density limits everywhere limit the supply of modest housing, thus creating housing shortages and homelessness.

Finally, Houston’s negative characteristics are partially a result of government spending and regulation; as I have written elsewhere, that city has historically had a wide variety of anti-walkability policies, so it is far more regulated than the video suggests.

The post Why Houston Isn’t An Argument for Zoning appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Mass homeownership might have had no negative side effects in a society in which most people live in the same house until they are dead, and as a result are not overly concerned with the house’s resale value. 

But in modern America, people often hop from one house to the other, selling houses when they move, retire, or just add another child or two to their families.  And when people expect to sell their homes in a few years, they naturally want those homes to get more expensive (or to use a common euphemism, to “appreciate in value” so homeowners can “accumulate wealth”).

To help achieve this goal, homeowners have a strong incentive to lobby government to use zoning codes and other regulations to limit housing supply, in order to help homes get more expensive (or in zoning-talk, “increase property values”).  And because government has been quite successful in doing exactly that, housing costs have exploded in many metro areas, which in turn means that more and more people cannot afford homes any more (at least not without considerable dislocation of some sort, such as moving to someplace with minimal economic opportunity).

So perhaps we’d all be better off if government stopped encouraging home ownership, right?  Well, maybe not.  After the 2008 recession, homeownership rates declined from a postwar peak of 69 percent to its current level, which in turn meant that the number of non-homeowners in search of rental options increased.  And when the demand for rental housing increased, the cost of renting of course increased as well. So declines in homeownership are bad too. The only real solution is to this dilemma is to create institutional firewalls to protect landowners’ right to build, such as statewide laws that limit the discretion of local governments.

The post Are increased levels of homeownership good for affordability? No… and yes. appeared first on Market Urbanism.

But there are other urbanist and market books on the market. What makes this one unique? First, it focuses on Southern California, rather than taking a nationwide or worldwide perspective (though Stephens does have a few essays about other cities). Second, the book’s short-essay format means that one does not have to read a huge amount of text to understand his arguments.

Because the book is a group of short essays, it doesn’t have one long argument. However, a few of the more interesting essays address:

1. The negative side effects of liquor license regulation. Stephens writes that the Los Angeles zoning process gives homeowners effective veto power over new bars. As a result, the neighborhood near UCLA has no bars, which in turn causes UCLA students go to other neighborhoods to drink, elevating the risk to the public from drunk driving.
2. The Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles; Los Angeles facilitated the transfer by giving land to the Dodgers- but only after a referendum passed with support from African-American and Latino neighborhoods. On the other hand, the construction of Dodger Stadium displaced a Latino community. To me, this story illustrates that arguments about “equity” can be simplistic. Los Angeles Latinos were both more likely than suburban whites to support Dodger Stadium, yet were more likely to be displaced by that stadium. So was having a stadium more equitable or less equitable than having no stadium? (On the other hand, a stadium that displaced no one might have been more equitable than either outcome).
3. Why developers are so often vilified. Stephens suggests that this may be because their products are visible on the streets to people who don’t use them, who can condemn those products as they walk or drive past them. By contrast, if we don’t buy a consumer product we might never know what it looks like.

More broadly, Stephens points out the gap between what urban planners want and what actually happens. Urban planners are often blamed for overregulation; but Stephens suggests that most urban planners share his vision for Los Angeles, but are frustrated by neighborhood activists’ veto power over new development.

The post Review: The Urban Mystique, by Josh Stephens appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Most of this paper isn’t really about the effect of housing supply on prices at all. Instead, the first 80 percent of the paper seems to argue that it makes no sense for low-skilled domestic workers to live in cities, because “Several decades ago mid-skilled work was clustered in big cities, while low-skilled work was most prevalent in the countryside. No longer; the mid-skilled jobs that remain are more likely to be found in rural areas than in urban ones.” (p. 20).

The authors’ attack on upzoning is in the last few pages, and is based on broad, sweeping generalizations rather than actual data. First, they say that upzoning “would very likely involve replacing older and lower-quality housing stock in areas highly favoured by the market, effectively decreasing housing supply for lower income households in desirable areas.” (p. 30). They cite no source or data for this assertion- just pure conjecture. What’s wrong with their claim? First, such gentrification happens without upzoning; for example, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, gentrification occurred through renovation of existing structures, rather than new, taller buildings- and of course places where new construction is politically difficult (such as San Francisco and Manhattan) are notorious for gentrification. Second, it assumes that new housing inevitably replaces older housing, rather than, say, vacant lots- an obvious overgeneralization..

Second, they rely on the “but we’re already building new housing!” argument. They cite a paywalled newpaper article to support this statement: “rents are now declining for the highest earners while continuing to increase for the poorest in San Francisco, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Washington, noting that a boom in luxury construction in these areas has failed to ease housing market competition for cheaper properties.” (p. 30). But of course there is a huge difference between rents in San Francisco (where development is in fact quite difficult and where new construction decreased by 41 percent in 2018) and rents in Atlanta (where development is less difficult).

They then proceed to rely on Yonah Freemark’s study of some neighborhoods in Chicago, citing his work for the claim that in “Chicago, for example, it has been found that upzoning has had unintended consequences, such as raising housing prices without necessarily triggering additional construction of newly permitted dwellings.” (p. 32). But as Freemark himself has noted, ” “b) 5 yrs [the period of his study] may not be enough time for full upzoning effects. c) Upzonings are still probably good for affordability @ metro scale.” So Freemark’s work doesn’t support their sweeping claims.

Finally, they (correctly) point out that more lenient zoning won’t cure segregation. But it also won’t cure Lyme disease. So what?

The post The Storper paper: not exactly a bombshell appeared first on Market Urbanism.