zoning

YIMBY Can Populate Conference Halls (at Least)

Tim W. Ferguson — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 08:21:21 -0400

The Biden administration's Realtor subsidy scheme is the latest flag, but the politics of "affordable housing" cut across normal partisan bounds. A New York Times article examines how opposition to single-family zoning attracts left and right. But, my post asks, what about the broad middle of homeowners? https://timwferguson.com/2024/03/10/yimby-can-populate-conference-halls/

Make Housing Affordable by Abolishing Growth Boundaries, not Ending Density Restrictions: Reason Magazine Debate

Wendell Cox — Fri, 26 May 2023 17:44:14 -0400

In too many metropolitan areas, housing is no longer affordable for middle-class households, especially in markets subject to "urban containment," now the world's dominant planning regime. According to planning experts Arthur C. Nelson and Casey Dawkins, urban containment draws "a line around an urban area"; it includes urban growth boundaries and greenbelts. It is "explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area, while encouraging" infill, to limit or block organic urban expansion.

Urban containment is intended to increase urban land costs. Shifting demand inside the contained area produces an abrupt increase in land values at the boundary, distorting the land value gradient. As Nelson and Dawkins say, "This shift should decrease the value of land outside the boundary and increase the value of land inside the boundary"(emphasis added), which effectively sets a higher "floor value" for urban land. This is the "urban containment effect."

Read the full discussion at: the May issue of Reason.

Wendell Cox (Demographia): Affirmative
Christian Britschgi (Reason magazine): Negative

Court Blocks Minneapolis Single-Family Zoning Abolition

Wendell Cox — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 18:57:20 -0400

The City of Minneapolis “cannot enforce its controversial long-range plan eliminating single-family zoning, but it could do so in the future if it meets certain conditions, a Hennepin County district judge ruled Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by a trio of environmental organizations.” According to Susan Du and Liz Navratil of the Star Tribune, Smart Growth Minneapolis, the Audubon Society of Minneapolis and Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds “sued to force the city to conduct an environmental review, alleging that ‘that a plan allowing the increase in density would likely pollute natural resources because of the increase in hard surfaces, soil erosion and increased runoff, among other adverse effects.’”

Hennepin County District Judge Joseph Klein issued a summary judgment writing that: "The City has not put forth any evidence showing that a full build-out will not have any of the potential adverse environmental impacts."

Judge Klein “criticized the city's defense for ‘vaguely’ dismissing the risks that the plan presents to the environment by arguing "a full build-out of almost 150,000 new residential units is extremely unlikely to occur," The Star-Tribune noted that despite the City’s “extremely unlikely” argument, the 150,000 units could be permitted throughout its duration.

Demographic Note: Like most central cities that have not annexed or consolidated with other jurisdictions, the city of Minneapolis has suffered significant population loss. The city of Minneapolis population peaked at 522,000 in 1950, dropping to 368,000 in 1990 and recovering to 430,000 in 2020. The 92,000 city population loss over the period contrasts with the growth of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, from 1,330,000 in 1950 to 3,690,000 in 2020 (present geographical definition), an increase of 2,360,000, or 177%. All of the metropolitan area’s growth has been outside the city of Minneapolis since 1950. The metropolitan area (labor market area) now covers 15 counties, 13 in Minnesota and 2 in Wisconsin.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Restoring the California Dream

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 17:32:25 -0500

Join us for a webinar on January 21st, hosted by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky to learn how we can restore the California Dream for middle and working class Californians. Following the presentation of the report, there will be an all-star panel led by Jeff Ball, new CEO of the Orange County Business Council.

Panel participants include Raul Anaya, Joe Hensley, and Karla Del Rio.

The Poor Side of Town

Aaron M. Renn — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 11:34:09 -0400

The city of Indianapolis is building a new jail and criminal justice center on the southeast side of the city. This means many of the current users of the City-County Building, namely the courts, will be vacating the property. There’s a lot of discussion locally about the future of that building and whether it should be redeveloped. The Indianapolis Business Journal asked me to contribute my thoughts, and I revisited my old idea to demolish the building entirely and redevelop the site.

Monday I was in Washington to participate in a book discussion of Howard Husock’s new work The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It. Obviously we talk about the intersection of zoning and housing affordability, but the conversation ranges well beyond that. Here’s a replay of the event:

Read the rest of this piece at Heartland Intelligence.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America’s cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Zoning and Urban Containment: The Need for Clarity

Phil Hayward — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 12:37:43 -0400

It is a terrible mistake to be confusing ALL zoning rules with the single true determinant of inequity in housing and economic mobility.

That is, can rural land at rural land prices, be converted to urban use?

This suppresses the price of all urban land to the extent that it is such a small input into “housing costs” relative to the cost of structures, it is very hard to push “house prices” up into unaffordable territory.

There is absolutely no city in the UK that does not have “house prices” at least double the price of the affordable, median-multiple-3 cities of the USA, in spite of the UK cities being 4 to 10 times denser than the US examples.

As long as you have urban planning or proxies for it, that rations the overall land supply, site values are highly elastic to allowed density, so much so that density correlates the wrong way with “affordability”.

This is a very important lesson that needs to be understood, fast, or there will be years or even decades of wrong policy made.