Category Archives: Zoning

What HUD’s Been Up To

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by Michael Lewyn

There has been some controversy about the federal government’s new “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) rule. Supporters hope, and opponents fear, that the rule will integrate lily-white suburbs and eliminate exclusionary zoning. However, there is reason to believe that the rule’s impacts will be fairly minor.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which enacted the rule, did so in order to implement sec. 808(d) of the Fair Housing Act, which requires federal agencies “to administer their programs…relating to housing and urban development…in a manner affirmatively to further” the policies of the Act—in other words, to affirmatively further fair housing.

In the past, HUD has sought to implement this statute by requiring grant recipients (such as local governments and public housing agencies) to draft an analysis of impediments (AI) to fair housing. An AI typically described impediments to racial integration, such as exclusionary zoning and racial disparities in mortgage lending. HUD decided that the AIs were not tremendously successful, because they did not contain enough data and were not adequately linked to other planning documents. (80 Fed. Reg. 42348).

The new rule requires grantees to create a new document called the “Assessment of Fair Housing” (AFH) every five years. The AFH will address a community’s barriers to integrated housing, such as “integration and segregation; racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty; disparities in access to opportunity, and disproportionate housing needs based on race, color [and other factors]” (80 Fed. Reg. 42355). The AFH will summarize any current litigation, analyze relevant data, and identify major factors limiting housing opportunity. The grant recipient must also set goals for overcoming the effects of these factors.To receive funding from HUD, a grantee must certify that it will affirmatively further fair housing, which means that it must promise to take meaningful actions to further these goals.  (80 Fed. Reg. 42316).  In other words, the grant recipient has to create paperwork stating: “This is why our city/county/area is more segregated than we would like, and this is what we would like to do about it.” Continue reading →

Kotkin and the “Assault on Suburbia”

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by Michael Lewyn

A recent article by Joel Kotkin tries to stir up a stew of resentment about alleged “attacks on suburbia”.  Kotkin’s article is in black; my comments to the article are in gray.

COUNTERING PROGRESSIVES’ ASSAULT ON SUBURBIA

BY JOEL KOTKIN – July 10, 2015

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly FOUR IN FIVE HOME BUYERS prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, NEARLY THREE-QUARTERS of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.

THIS IS BASED ON WENDELL COX’S DEFINITIONS OF CITIES AND SUBURBS, WHICH MIGHT NOT BE YOURS AND MINE.  BY HIS DEFINITION, MOST CORE CITIES (EXCEPT FOR THE MOST DENSE ONES) ARE “SUBURBS.”

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. DENSITY is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

DENSITY CAN MEAN MORE SUBURBAN HOUSING, NOT LESS.  FOR EXAMPLE, IF A SUBURB REDUCES ITS MINIMUM LOT SIZE REQUIREMENTS SO THAT YOU CAN BUILD 10 HOMES PER ACRE INSTEAD OF ONE, THAT’S MORE SUBURBAN HOMES.  Continue reading →

The Failure of Preservation

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by Michael Lewyn

In an excellent blog post, Reuben Duarte explained that many big-city zoning disputes involve a conflict of visions: a “preservation camp” favors preserving neighborhood character at all costs, while an “affordability camp” favors construction of new housing in order to make the city more affordable.

Duarte write that the preservation camp’s interests “hover around preventing evictions of tenants in long-held residences, but also includes the topics of traffic (“this neighborhood can’t support more development, because, traffic!”), parking (replace “traffic” with “parking”), and neighborhood character (“building is too tall or too dense!” “Views!”).”

It seems to me that to the extent government uses preservation as a reason to exclude new housing, arguments based on “neighborhood character” fail on their own terms: either because limiting housing supply itself changes neighborhood character, or because it forces less exclusionary places to change their character.

Zoning restrictions designed to limit traffic create the second problem. For example, suppose a city freezes a neighborhood’s housing supply in order to limit traffic and parking. Other things being equal, fewer households mean fewer cars. So at first glance, this policy has no losers. But if a city or region is adding households, those new households have to go somewhere. And if they don’t go to your neighborhood, they go to another neighborhood, adding cars (and thus traffic/parking problems) to that neighborhood. Continue reading →

Not Racist- But Similar to Racism

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by Michael Lewyn

Is zoning racist? After a committee designed to study Seattle’s zoning codes suggested some significant reforms to the city’s code, Mayor Ed Murray said: “In Seattle, we’re also dealing with a pretty horrific history of zoning based on race, and there’s residue of that still in place.” Even if this remark is factually true, it doesn’t mean that today’s zoning is racist: low-density zoning exists in black neighborhoods as well as white ones, and opposition to changing such zoning crosses color lines.

But it seems to me that even though zoning is not consistently or intentionally racist, zoning is similar to racist housing discrimination (or “RHD” for short) in a few ways. Both involve a politically influential dominant class (in one case, whites generally; in the other case, homeowners of all colors) who have the votes to impose their will on the political process. In both situations, the dominators use their political power to exclude someone else from its neighborhood; racists usually seek to exclude blacks, while pro-zoning homeowners usually seek to exclude new residents regardless of color (to the extent that zoning is designed to exclude housing smaller or more compact than the status quo, such as smaller houses or multifamily dwellings).*

Both RHD and low-density zoning do, on balance, exclude blacks more than whites—though of course RHD does so much more consistently. One purpose of zoning is to raise housing prices (or, as courts and homeowners euphemistically say, “values”). And higher housing prices mean higher rents, which means that everyone has to pay more for less. If you don’t have any money, you are obviously going to suffer more from that policy than someone who has plenty of money, since the difference between having a small apartment and sleeping on the street is a bit more significant than the difference between having a 8000-square-foot mansion and a 12,000-square-foot mansion. And since blacks tend to have less money than whites, on balance blacks are going to suffer a little more than whites from these policies, just as they are going to suffer more from any tax imposed without ability to pay (for example, an increase in bus fares).** Continue reading →

When States Should Blow the Whistle

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by Michael Lewyn

Generally, states limit local governments’ means of raising tax revenue. Both Democratic and Republican governors consider it their duty to micromanage the property tax rates of local governments, and local governments can rarely institute a new type of tax without state consent. On the other hand, local governments tend to have free rein in land use matters; even relatively activist state governments tend to allow cities to choke off housing supply without state interference. Is this really the right way to do things?

Just as we ask ourselves, “When does the state have any business interfering with individual rights?”, we should also ask ourselves, “When does the state have any business interfering with a municipal government?” And just as states are most likely to get involved where an individual hurts other individuals, a state should be most willing to get involved where a city’s action affects people living outside the city—for example, the “tragedy of the commons” situation where a policy is rational for each individual city, but is not rational for the region as a whole.

Applying this principle, I am not sure why states should limit municipal taxing powers. When a city raises taxes, it only hurts itself, because it takes the risk that people will flee that city in search of less restrictive cities. And if several cities and towns in a region raise taxes, such tax increases become even less rational for a town that refuses to raise taxes, since that town can gain residents by being a tax haven.

By contrast, environmental issues are especially well suited for state (and for that matter, federal) regulation, because one city’s policies might harm residents of nearby municipalities. For example, suppose that a suburb allows unlimited development of wetlands within its borders. If the absence of wetlands causes increased flooding, the resulting damage may cross municipal borders and harm residents of nearby towns. Or if a suburb decides to build high-speed stroads and starve public transit so that its jobs are inaccessible by public transit, reverse commuters in other municipalities will have to drive to reach those jobs, causing pollution not just in the suburb in question, but also in their own neighborhoods. Thus, states should be responsible for wetlands regulation, and should perhaps play some rule in ensuring that suburban employment centers are transit-accessible. Continue reading →

Libertarian-Friendly Drought Control

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by Michael Lewyn

In response to California’s drought, Gov. Jerry Brown recently issued an executive order proposing a wide variety of water restrictions. For example, paragraph 3 of the order provides that the state Department of Water Resources shall “lead a statewide initiative… to collectively replace 50 million square feet of lawns and ornamental turf with drought tolerant landscapes.” In particular, the state will fund “lawn replacement programs in underserved communities.” It is not clear from the order whether the state plans to mandate replacement of every square inch of lawn in California, or merely to fund local governments who wish to do so.

This initiative certainly seems to have reasonable goals. In fact, one-third of all residential water use involves landscape irrigation of some sort, and it seems to me that lawn-watering is a wasteful use of water compared to agriculture or bathing or drinking. But cities and states can reduce lawn-watering through means less expensive and coercive than policing individual consumption or even spending taxpayer money on lawn reform.

Some local zoning codes require homeowners to have lawns or even to water them. A drought-sensitive local government would of course eliminate such restrictions—but since not every local government is equally enlightened, California could both reduce water use and expand homeowners’ rights by amending its zoning enabling legislation to prohibit local governments from enacting such restrictions. Statewide legislation would eliminate the primary excuse for lawn-watering regulations: that green lawns maintain property values. If state laws make green lawns scarce, homeowners are less likely to view green lawns as necessary for neighborhood desirability. Continue reading →

Do Tall Buildings Attract Rich Foreigners?

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I was discussing Washington, D.C.’s height limits with some acquaintances on Twitter; one of them suggested that allowing taller buildings might turn Washington into a “global city”, which in turn would cause foreigners to surge into Washington and drive up real estate prices (as has arguably been the case in parts of Vancouver and New York).

This argument seems to be to be based on two assumptions that are at best unprovable:

1.  Washington is just attractive enough to attract foreign demand if height limits are lifted. Since I don’t know of any evidence of a surge in foreign investment in the Washington suburbs (which lack height limits) this seems hard to believe.

It could be argued that the blocks near Congress or the White House are so prestigious that they have an attraction that the District of Columbia’s more urban suburbs lack. Even if this was true, it seems to me that (a) this is not true of most of the District, and (b) if it was true, the District’s townhouses and existing stock of mid-rise buildings would be just as attractive to the rich foreigners as high-rises.

2.   Rich foreigners will only invest in urban high-rise condos (as opposed to other types of buildings). This argument could be true in theory, but I don’t see any evidence that this is the case. In fact, at least some low-rise areas are attractive to foreign buyers; for example, 41 percent of trulia.com searches in Los Angeles’s suburban Bel Air district come from foreigners, as opposed to 13 percent of searches in Los Angeles generally. Thus, it seems to me that if a well-off area lacks foreign demand absent high-rises, high-rises will not create such demand.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)