4 Zoning Regulations We Should All Be Against
Housing is expensive in the United States’ major cities because we don’t have enough homes.
When more people want to live somewhere than there are homes available, prices go up. This is basic supply and demand: if supply stays limited and demand grows, costs rise. Renters and homebuyers face skyrocketing prices, and more people get pushed out of communities they’d like to live in.
This is especially true of our major cities: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, to name a few with severe housing shortages.
Yet in so many states and cities, there are zoning regulations that make it harder and more expensive to build.
Zoning and housing regulations are rules that local governments set to determine what can be built where. Some of them are necessary. For example, in many places it’s illegal to build a factory too close to a school. Good.
However, many zoning laws only hold us back. Those are the ones I want to focus on today. These rules limit housing, raise costs, and make our cities less livable.
1) Exclusionary Zoning
Exclusionary zoning refers to rules that block certain types of housing from being built.
For example, in many parts of the United States, it’s illegal to build townhouses, duplex homes, or apartment buildings.
They’re only allowed to build single-family, detached homes. (Think of the typical suburban home that’s completely separate from the homes next to it.)
Because detached single-family homes take up so much land, having only single-family homes limits the amount of homes we can build close to job centers, driving up prices by restricting supply.
In order to build more homes and more affordable housing types, we need a variety of options.
Ending single-family-only zoning doesn’t mean eliminating single-family homes. It just means making room for more types of housing so that more people can afford to live there.
Single-family zone is also an environmental disaster.
2) Parking Minimums
I’ve written previously about why parking minimums ruin cities.
Our country seems obsessed with ensuring every car has housing, but we don’t seem to obsess about people having housing.
Parking minimums are zoning rules that require developers to build a certain number of parking spaces with every new housing unit, store, or office.
They force us to build more parking than is necessary.
Here’s why parking minimums are a problem.
Less housing gets built for more money
Parking takes up valuable space and costs tens of thousands of dollars per spot to build, especially in garages. That’s space and money that could go toward creating more housing. The result is fewer homes at higher prices.
Limits housing near transit
In areas with good public transit, parking minimums undermine efforts to create walkable, transit-friendly communities. Transit only works if a lot of people live within walking distance of the station. That means we need dense housing near transit.
Instead of building more homes near subway stations or bus routes, developers have to waste space on parking.
Encourages sprawl
Parking minimums spread things out, making car ownership more necessary, pushing people farther out and leading to more traffic, pollution, and disinvestment in transit.
Makes displacement worse
In cities like New York, parking minimums force more development into the few areas without those rules, often gentrifying working-class neighborhoods faster. When wealthy parts of suburban Queens have parking minimums, that means more of the development will get pushed to places like Bed Stuy, Brooklyn.
Eliminating parking minimums doesn’t mean eliminating parking. Developers can still build it where needed. The difference is that no one is forced to build unnecessary parking that drives up costs.
3) Barriers to Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)
Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are smaller, independent homes on the same lot as a main house, like backyard cottages, garage apartments, or basement units.
In many places, zoning laws make it hard or impossible to build ADUs through outright bans, complex approval processes, or unrealistic design requirements.
ADUs:
- Add gentle density without changing the look of a neighborhood.
- Offer affordable options for renters, students, and seniors.
- Give homeowners a way to earn extra income or house family members.
Legalizing and simplifying ADU construction is one of the easiest, most popular ways to add housing in established neighborhoods.
4) Height Restrictions
In the public imagination, we often think of 3-5 stories as affordable, and big towers as unaffordable.
I think this gives us a bias against tall buildings, and we often fight against them.
But making buildings taller is one of the easiest ways to add more housing units with lower costs (and with no further use of land.)
Again, even if those apartments in the big towers of Long Island City aren’t “affordable,” they mean those who can afford them live there instead of taking a housing unit in an older building.
Opponents of height restrictions argue that tall buildings obstruct light, views, or “historic character.”
This is all true. Edward Glaeser in Triumph of the City says it well. “Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a cost.”
In other words, when we stop new buildings from rising, we don’t freeze a city in place—we squeeze out the people and businesses that can no longer afford to compete for limited space.
Reasonable height limits might make sense in specific contexts, but blanket restrictions in transit-rich, job-rich areas do more harm than good.
“Liberal” Cities Need This More Than Ever
The big “liberal” cities of the U.S. have failed to build enough housing to meet the demand. This has driven up housing costs and forced many working-class people out.
One piece of the puzzle in reversing this is to take a look at the zoning regulations that keep us back from building the housing we need. I think these 4 most people can get behind. Let me know in the comments what zoning regulation you think holds us back, or if you disagree with this list, let me know why.
A gray-area zoning regulation is called “Inclusionary zoning,” and I dissect it in this article below.
One Comment