Pro-Housing Zoning Policy Gains Traction Nationally — But Runs Into Barriers

The lack of housing at all income levels has become such a pressing issue that traditional attitudes toward development have slowly begun to shift, with cities and states beginning to take more pro-development stances — in what is sometimes the only bipartisan issue uniting elected officials across political lines. 

In particular, governments across the country are addressing the housing crisis via one of the more powerful levers available to them: zoning policy. That can take the form of restricting single-family zoning, encouraging denser development in transit zones, and many other policies that increase by-right development and decrease barriers to multi-family construction. 

2023 has seen major wins for advocates of housing development, particularly at the state level. Earlier this month, California voted to extend a significant 2017 housing bill. Washington state saw several major housing laws roll out this year, including a sweeping rollback on single-family zoning. In March, Florida signed a housing bill that overrides local zoning requirements to make it easier to build multifamily developments. And New York City just last week proposed vast zoning changes that would facilitate taller, denser housing construction.

Massachusetts recently used its weight to pressure local authorities in the Boston area by making additional state grants unavailable to municipalities that fail to offer multifamily zoning. Montana pushed a number of housing bills through earlier this year as well, targeting sprawl, inefficient permitting, accessory dwelling units and beyond. 

These are important and significant shifts, particularly at the state level. But considerable roadblocks persist that can prevent housing from actually getting built. Even when cities or states pass pro-development policies, labyrinthine zoning codes and design requirements can stifle development, while lack of coordination between state- and city-level rules can further complicate issues — sometimes by design.

For developers on the ground, these confusing or even contradictory policies can make it challenging to address the housing shortage. 

When governments make pro-housing policy changes, they sometimes target one part of the development process without accounting for how many different criteria new projects need to adhere to. 

“There’s sort of a web of regulatory barriers that inhibit building,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, the Paulette Goddard professor of urban policy and planning and faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. “Take the case of Minneapolis with their zoning reform. Basically they changed the zoning ordinance to allow duplexes on single-family lots, but they didn’t change the floor area ratio, so they didn’t change the density.”

Meaningful development reform requires changes to zoning, design criteria, and other project requirements. 

“As regulations change, people don’t always appreciate the domino effect of changes. You might make a change that makes it easy to get through zoning overall, but maybe not your parking requirements,” said Keith Gregory, a development associate at Summit Housing Group who was previously director of housing for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Tucson, Ariz. 

That’s why it’s important to consider what changing housing policies actually achieves, said Ellen. “You haven’t built new housing  — you’ve created conditions that are more favorable,” she said. “In the long run they are likely to make a difference, but in the short run they may not be enough.”

Resistance to development, particularly in areas heavy with single-family homes, is still very much entrenched, even though affordable housing programs help buyers of single-family homes. 

“I think there needs to be a reframing of what even is affordable housing in this country at this point,” said Nicholas Julian, senior program manager in land use at the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). “Traditionally, affordable housing was federally subsidized housing reserved for people making a fraction of whatever the [area median income] was in an area. … But now affordable housing is being used to cover that, but also housing for first-time homebuyers.”

In particular, states and local jurisdictions are often at odds, with municipalities resistant to development while states pass top-down measures to ease the path to development. 

When a 2016 rule in California prohibited municipalities from banning accessory dwelling units — small, independent units often made from converted space in houses, and known by the acronym ADU — some local governments enacted new regulations to circumvent that rule, such as requiring extra parking or greater setbacks for these units. The Brookings Institute calls these reactionary policies poison pills meant to make it impractical to actually build ADUs. 

Municipalities will sometimes use material standards or design codes to prevent certain types of housing without explicitly restricting them — or they may be overt about their intentions, said Julian. 

“We see creative and sometimes not so creative ways that cities will put language into their codes that we at NAHB see as exclusionary,” Julian said “We’ve seen one place where they created an arbitrary radius and said, ‘You cannot build multifamily housing within X miles of other multifamily housing.’ I looked at their map, and that’s basically the whole county. To us that is, like, just cut and dried, black and white, exclusionary: ‘We don’t want any housing here.’ ”

In another case, the City Council of Woodside, Calif., unsuccessfully proposed classifying the entire municipality as a mountain lion sanctuary to skirt the requirements of the 2021 California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency Act.

That act, also known as Senate Bill 9, makes it possible for property owners to subdivide and build more homes on their lots. However, it leaves a lot of room for local interpretation and opposition, such as by allowing homeowner associations to prohibit ADUs. Even within the same city, different neighborhoods may have very different expectations for housing development. 

Of course, American zoning was a tapestry of different jurisdictions and overlays long before the move to support housing development took off in recent years, with around 30,000 zoning districts in total and no easy way to navigate across them. There is a project to develop a national atlas of zoning, displaying the zoning guidelines for the entire country in one place, but the effort is patchwork at best, with only 21 states having completed or begun their zoning atlas efforts. 

In the meantime, the rapidly changing zoning landscape can create challenges for the developers and bureaucrats working in the field. 

In addition, zoning is often a hot-button issue, frequently fomenting community resentment and protracted debates. So, for public officials and developers, policy itself is hardly the only factor to consider. Public opinion has an important role to play as well. 

Developers and housing advocates need to grapple with the fear that incremental policy change will lead to an outcome of give an inch and they’ll take a mile. James May, housing and community development officer with the Austin Community Development Commission in Texas’ capital city, pointed to a recent government action in Austin to allow ADUs on single-family lots that caused a tremendous backlash.

“I think that there’s a lot of miscommunication and misconstruing of things,” May said. “The outcry against that ordinance made it sound like we were going to force people to build ADUs in their backyard and in their front yard, like we were going to subdivide your house. … That’s not how it works,” he added. “So there’s a lot of confusion. And the best way to counteract that was with clear communication.” 

May also works on a training program to help new developers, in particular women and people of color, gain the skills and knowledge necessary to successfully add to the local housing inventory. Anecdotally, he said, communities are more tolerant of local developers than of national companies. 

Local or not, developers can do their part to communicate better, too. Andy Waxman, New England regional vice president of real estate development at The Community Builders, a nonprofit developer, said that developers should be open to adjust where reasonable.

“Zoning is a political process on some level and so it’s both the politics of getting something approved, but also being a good neighbor over time,” Waxman said. 

Being a good neighbor starts well before you break ground, according to May. “The example I use with the development community is that you can be building something right next door to something that [community members] want or need, but they just see construction unless you actually come to them.”

Gregory said it’s not just about talking. It’s also about talking to the right people. “I like being introduced. Real estate agents are fantastic; they’re already doing this by being in the community and knowing the players. I lean heavily on brokers and agents,” he said.

David Schwartz, principal at New York’s Slate Property Group, says it takes time to develop good pro-housing development policy. 

“New York’s a big state. It took California a few tries to get things done,” he said. “It doesn’t always happen overnight. I think there’s been a lot of progress that’s been made and I think there’s a real understanding and a will, and I’m optimistic that this year, or next legislative session, we will start to get some of these things accomplished.”

If communication is key to building multilevel support for more housing growth even after the states are onboard with it, builders might need to take the first step in new affordable housing narratives.

Affordable housing as a term can mean many different things, so tying the term to a clear representation of the people who will live at a given property, such as teachers or working-class parents, can help with clarity, said Waxman. 

“It’s important to say, ‘OK, 80 percent AMI translates into this number, but also translates this into these types of jobs,’ ” Waxman said.  “I think that process is important regardless of what the name of it is, because I’m not sure there’s a perfect name that’s going to fully explain all the nuances of it.”

Another way to disassociate affordable housing from poor or undesirable living conditions is to build better properties. When low-quality, unattractive affordable housing gets built, neighbors will think that that represents affordable housing in general, said Summit Housing Group’s Gregory. 

“Go someplace else in town where developers really invested in the way the building looks —  with nice colors, balconies — and it’s gorgeous. If that were the narrative, if that was the thing that we highlighted more and built more of, I think people would soften to the idea,” Greogry said. “It’s really up to us to be smarter about how we market the developments that we build.”