The single-family home continues to predominate residential zoning at the expense of the “missing middle” of multi-family housing arrangements, like duplexes and triplexes, so named because they remain severely underutilized despite ever-growing demand. This has contributed to rising homelessness, now at a seven-year high, with Los Angeles particularly impacted.
One solution to the growing housing crisis—construction of tiny-home villages—might also help move the overall needle toward zoning reform. Besides providing stability and community to its residents, tiny-home villages on a large scale could provide a window into the social and economic progress to be expected once archaic zoning rules are repealed and the geography of housing is finally opened to free-market forces. Los Angeles has constructed two tiny-home villages thus far, and the results are promising—for the homeless, and for advocates of zoning reform.
Nearly a century since the Supreme Court upheld zoning as a legitimate governmental power, most residentially zoned land remains exclusively single-family, including 90 percent in Connecticut. Countless municipalities enforce exclusionary zoning rules around lot sizes, minimum square footage, and parking limits that virtually foreclose the construction of duplexes, triplexes, and the occasional mid- or high-rise on all but a relative sliver of residential land. These restrictions have hurt those who cannot afford or do not want to live in single-family neighborhoods.
In 2019, 46.3 percent of renting households were rent-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing—a more than 27 percent increase over the proportion of tenants who were rent-burdened in 2001. The predominance of single-family zoning is a primary cause, as even many cities continue to preserve the Levittown ideal. In 2019, 94 percent of residential land in San Jose was single-family only. In Charlotte, the figure was 84 percent. New York City and Washington, D.C., at 15 percent and 36 percent, respectively, appear as outliers. With little new room for the missing middle, and the for-sale housing stock at a record low, renters—and the homeless—bear much of the economic squeeze.
Entrenched homeowners remain united in the fear that denser dwellings in their neighborhood would reduce the value of their houses, have for decades used their local political dominance to wage successful wars against zoning reform efforts. It is also not helpful that reformists are a hodgepodge of profit-seeking developers, millennials worse off than their parents, and civil-rights activists fighting lasting geographic segregation. It might be a matter of time before these groups form a unified front powerful enough to overcome obstinate homeowners’ rent-seeking tactics. Thereafter, it would be up to the market to decide which zones remain (or become) single-family, and in which the missing middle flourishes. But until then, for the homeless at least, the costs are severe.
While tiny-home villages continue to face not-in-my-backyard (or “NIMBY”) resistance, tempers are no longer as flared as in the past. In the mid-2000s, a proposal in Austin to build a privately funded village to house the homeless caused an uproar among residents. It was eventually built on what its developer described as a “crummy, crap-filled piece of land” outside city limits. This sort of local response was more the rule than the exception for a long time. Softened reactions to recent proposals and ribbon-cuttings across the country suggest the dam has begun to break and tiny-home villages might be close to having a moment.
The recent opening of Los Angeles’s second such village has garnered some opposition (including from advocates who want more drastic solutions), but much less than a similar proposal in San Jose engendered just five years ago. Last year, Seattle’s city council eased restrictions on the number of villages permitted and private companies have stepped up to help fund construction. Plans are in the works to build a village in Salt Lake City. While advocates there are concerned about local pushback, tiny-home initiatives in other cities offer hope of a smooth rollout. One recent village in Wilmington, North Carolina appears to have received nothing but support from the surrounding community.
Removing or suspending zoning barriers in more places to experiment with more tiny-home uses would be a win not just for the homeless, but also for those fighting for the missing middle. The proliferation of tiny-home villages could protect the overall drive to remove artificial impediments to a freer housing market. Of course, lasting zoning reform will require more than just a smattering of local adjustments. But these tiny steps are firmly in the right direction.
For resistant homeowners, the success of these villages would show that alternative housing can grow the overall economic pie without shrinking their slice of it.
Sam Spiegelman is a legal associate in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies
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May 25, 2021 at 09:00PM
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Tiny houses for the homeless further the fight for the ‘missing middle’ - LA Daily News
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