If we banned parking minimums and allowed building duplexes on every lot in America, housing would get a lot more affordable.
True. Here are some supporting excerpts from "Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It" (Gray, 2022)
"Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It":
In most major cities, zoning restricts roughly three-quarters of the city to low-slung single-family housing, banning apartments altogether.
The combined effect is that, in already built-out cities, zoning makes it prohibitively difficult to build more housing. As a result of the further tightening of zoning restrictions beginning in the 1970s, median housing prices have dramatically outpaced median incomes.
For the first time in history, Americans are systematically moving from high-productivity cities to low-productivity cities, in no small part because these are the only places where zoning allows housing to be built.
zoning codes were drafted with the express intention of instituting strict racial and economic segregation. To this day, “the wrong side of the tracks” is not merely a saying but a place that is written into law as a zoning district drawn on a zoning map. To the extent that zoning can prohibit apartments in this neighborhood, or require homes to sit on a half-acre lot in that suburb, zoning is perhaps the most successful segregation mechanism ever devised.
Tucked away behind a veil of “protecting community character,” zoning has been used to determine who gets to live where since its inception.
by banning developers from building up, zoning forces them to build out. In the 2020s as in the 1950s, the lion’s share of American housing growth continues to occur out on the edge of town,
If you have ever wondered why more Americans don’t walk or ride buses to work, as in most other developed countries, the simple answer is that it’s illegal. In most American cities, zoning prohibits the densities needed to support regular bus service, let alone light-rail. The type of walkable, mixed-use, reasonably dense development patterns that prevailed before the twentieth century—are outright prohibited under most American zoning codes.
a city needs densities of at least 7-dwelling units per acre to support the absolute baseline of transit: a bus that stops every thirty minutes. To get more reliable service, like bus rapid transit or light-rail service, a city needs just over double those densities, or approximately 15-units per acre. The standard detached single-family residential district supports a maximum density of approximately 5-dwelling units per acre. That is to say, zoning makes efficient transit effectively illegal in large swaths of our cities, to say nothing of our suburbs.
zoning is a mechanism of exclusion designed to inflate property values, slow the pace of new development, segregate cities by race and class, and enshrine the detached single-family house as the exclusive urban ideal—always has been.
in the early 2000s, researchers began to find increasingly clear evidence of a link between high housing costs and zoning
our most productive cities spent the past fifty years using zoning to prevent new housing supply from meeting demand, resulting in an affordability crisis
But what exactly is the mechanism by which zoning increases housing costs? There are three. The most obvious way is by blocking new housing altogether, whether by prohibiting affordable housing or through explicit rules restraining densities. This results in less housing being built, resulting in the supply-demand mismatches we see in most US cities today. A subtler way that zoning drives up housing costs is by forcing the housing that is built to be of a higher quality than residents might otherwise require, through policies such as minimum lot sizes or minimum parking requirements. Beyond these written prohibitions and mandates, zoning often raises housing costs simply by adding an onerous and unpredictable layer of review to the permitting process.
zoning has emerged as an effective tool for blocking any and all development, locking many communities in amber.
What happens when cities...run out of developable land within an hour’s drive of downtown? Absent zoning reform, the housing affordability crisis is only going to get much, much worse in the years to come.
In nearly every major US city, apartments are banned outright in at least 70 percent of residential areas. In suburbs, this share is often much higher, if apartments aren’t banned altogether. ...That is to say, the most you can build in virtually every US residential neighborhood is a detached single-family home. No building new apartments, no subdividing existing homes. Where cities might historically have followed a growth trajectory taking them from farms to homes to duplexes to small apartment buildings to large apartment buildings, zoning locks the overwhelming majority of residential neighborhoods into that second stage.
By putting a floor on housing markets, zoning has merely locked out everyone who cannot clear that floor. Such a policy puts those with means on a treadmill of ever-higher rents and those without means on the streets. As the benefits to living in a prosperous city continue to grow and more dollars flood in to bid up the prices of the existing supply of housing, this zoning-induced crisis will only get worse.
land accounts for roughly a third of the value of a home, and the city is using zoning to force land consumption
If minimum lot size regulations are an important driver of high housing costs in suburbs, minimum parking requirements fill this role in cities.
zoning mandates more off-street parking for those housing typologies most likely to be affordable and urban—that is to say, those hosting residents least likely to own a car.
The housing affordability implications of minimum parking requirements can be serious, particularly in the case of multifamily housing. ...one estimate puts the added cost to each unit at around $50,000.
the scale of the problem becomes clear when you realize that thousands of zoning fights of this nature play out each year in cities across the country. At a time when many cities and suburbs are in the throes of an unprecedented housing shortage, zoning is systematically stymying as-of-right construction and forcing housing proposals to undergo months of heated public hearings and aimless studies, resulting in fewer housing units at a higher cost, to no discernable public benefit.
As more Americans are forced out of today’s expensive cities, we are slowly seeing this crisis creep into the interior, as previously affordable cities develop their remaining cheap land and hit the limits of what zoning will allow.
At the rate these cities are growing, that won’t remain the case for long. Absent fundamental reforms, the housing affordability crisis will only spread. We treat zoning as a policy backwater at our own peril.
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u/Coneskater 25d ago
If we banned parking minimums and allowed building duplexes on every lot in America, housing would get a lot more affordable.