Big Cities and Zoning: The Search for Affordable Housing

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This doc roughly gets it right.

Think about the demand side. There are relatively few obstructions to business and job formation. There are no laws against moving to a new area. And then we subsidize mortgages, provide incentives for first time buyers, housing vouchers and subsidized units. All of this drives up demand.

On the supply side, there are tens of thousands of laws and regulations that reduce the supply of housing. It can take a year to get an interior renovation designed and permitted. It takes 5-6 years to get a multifamily project done, if all goes well. We endlessly increase the cost through zoning, public input, constant building code changes, environmental regs, endless 'studies'... most of which do nothing for health and safety, but are instead pretending to do so while slowing down projects and providing political cover for anti-growth actors.

Basically, we are doing everything we can as a society to increase demand and reduce supply.

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/TODevpr 📅︎︎ Apr 18 2020 🗫︎ replies
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I just started sobbing, and my husband started crying, you know, it was really hard, because we just got settled and having children, not knowing where we're going to live or move to is very scary. I've literally been depressed because I spent the morning on Zillow, and had it on the Seattle area and there are zero homes in our price range. And if I told you I'd been going a little bit higher, so that when prices fall, I kind of already have them on my radar. So what happens in cities is you get an upturn of population growth because there's jobs. So you get jobs coming into the community, there's more innovation, more companies locating there, more people want to live there, developers start responding to that by building more housing and you start seeing housing production go up, permits are going up and then, neighbors start to complain, "There's too much noise. It blocked my view of the sky." "That's where I used to walk my dog." Zoning, really, is nothing more than the regulation that says how many units can possibly be built legally, on a particular property or parcel. And the Seattle planning commission released a report called, "Neighborhoods For All." And the bottom line, according to them, there's too much land in the city reserved for single family homes. Every single weekend since we found out we weren't going to be living here anymore is absorbed with looking for new housing. It just feels hopeless. I have no control over this housing market. I have no control when an affordable house is going to come up. So we're just kind of at the mercy of when people want to put a house on the market. Here I am making money, I'm getting regular raises, I'm working my way up the ladder. Okay, wow, look, I have nine years in the industry. When I get this giant pay raise, okay like, I'm a legitimate professional. But I'm still $20,000 short. We have to either wait for a really good opportunity, that is just a fluke, or we have to look outside the city, which we're not happy about. There's a perception out there, I think very real, that families are leaving central cities in different metro areas across the country. The cities, sure, they benefit from different people and different types of people at different stages in life. Central cities like Seattle have long established investment in schools, and just seeing that decay because the city didn't maintain its ability to be an attractive, worthwhile place for a family to live affordably, you know, that would be a tragedy. The city of Seattle's been, as a lot of large cities, confronted with housing problems, affordability of housing, and it sort of breaks into two segments, at least. One is the folks who don't have enough money for housing at all, they may need subsidized housing or free housing, and then there's the folks who are in the housing market, but they don't have a lot of money and they're very pressed to come up with enough money. They're not like one step away from being homeless, but they're too many steps away from being able to buy their own house. My husband's from Seattle, and finally after having children he decided, "Yeah absolutely, I wanna move back to Seattle." So we kinda made things work. I was able to work at the restaurant part-time and watch the kids. Once you start getting that commute number up closer to an hour each way, then you're literally eroding quality of life, just for financial purposes. What zoning ends up doing is segregating people. It segregates people from each other, it segregates people from their work, from their play, from their school, from their market, from their families. If the zoning on the property doesn't allow many units to be built, and if it certainly doesn't allow as many as the market would bear or as many as there are demand for, then you have under-supply of housing and home prices go up. And I always say, "Zoning is a 20th century solution to a 19th century problem." And the Ambler v. Euclid decision that was made almost 100 years ago now, has dictated the way we organize our cities in such a way that it has driven inflation, driven prices up, because it is limited supply in the face of rising demand. Zoning has a function. First off, cities have to plan for infrastructure. And if you have no idea, zoning allows a city to say, "You know what, we're expecting in this neighborhood, or this district, to redevelop at 200 units per acre, or some level of density." It's a dangerous place to go when we regulate cities so much that only really wealthy people can live there and poor people can only work there, and have to live outside of that. And that's a consequence of regulation, which I think is a critical distinction to make, that most people I think in our society today, in our country today, want to make that problem about class or greed or capitalism, when really what it's about is: we're just not letting people move freely in the market the way they should. President Harrell. Aye. Nine in favor, none opposed. With the unanimous vote, Seattle leaders moved forward with sweeping changes that supporters believe could bring more affordable housing options. A number of organizations in the city came together to fight this proposal and they tried to stop the city council from adopting it. Their pleas fell on deaf ears, so then they retained us to appeal it. There are fears older, smaller buildings will be torn down, and some say gentrification could impact neighborhoods like Wallingford. The further back you go in terms of when housing units were built, by virtue of being older, those apartment units were cheaper, right? The problem is that those apartment units tend to be on properties that are frequently a place where a brand-new bigger building would be appropriate. And tearing down that older, cheaper apartment is more likely to happen. Between 2005 and 2015, there were about 40,000 new units of housing created. There were about 5,000 units demolished. That's about an eight to one replacement ratio. There's nothing in Seattle that I can assure you, aside from the Space Needle, that we can't consider knocking down to build more housing. Up-zones are already approved for several Seattle neighborhoods and now the city's urban villages are looking at the impacts of bigger and taller buildings. Some of the areas, and I'd say relatively small part of it, were, sort of these vintage, historic neighborhoods. It's part of what makes Seattle a really special place. And some parts of the up-zones edged into these neighborhoods and would have basically destroyed them. What they wanted to do was a good thing, absolutely, you know, try to address the affordable housing problem both for those in the marketplace and those who need subsidized housing. But the plan they came up with really wasn't going to work for the people in the marketplace. I had no idea how much I found my own identity in where I live, and that in itself has been a process to work out. They're popping a little bit huh? Even though I see all these blocks, I'm just trying to navigate them, you know. And it would be nice if I felt like there was a way to undo some of the blocks. But because I can't, I'm just doing the best I can with what I have. We've worked hard our whole lives and it's just still so unaffordable for families. We've always wanted to own a home but we just didn't realize the magnitude of owning your own home until the situation of not being able to live here anymore. It's a bad choice that they're confronted with, and that's why we want to have a program that provides for affordable housing, and here I'm talking about affordable, not for the homeless but the lower end of the... folks like Michelle and Kip. And more supply you create, the more opportunity, the more freedom, and the more mobility you've created. And that's the answer to this problem. It's the answer to their problem and it's the answer to problems that thousands of people like Kip and Michelle and their family are facing all across the city and all across the country.
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Channel: The Federalist Society
Views: 59,421
Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5
Keywords: #fedsoc, federalist society, conservative, libertarian, fedsoc, federalism, fed soc, regulation, policy, city, urban, affordable, housing, expensive
Id: 5TGcTkAMVAs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)
Published: Tue Mar 31 2020
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