Making the case that antiquated rules governing development in the United States are driving up housing prices amid a growing affordability crisis, advocates for statewide zoning reform are seeking to build on recent successes from California to Connecticut. But statewide mandates are encountering resistance from those defending local control of land use, a system that has prevailed for a century.

While the rule changes being implemented or considered are at a technical level previously only familiar to urban planning professionals, they could have an outsized impact—and not just on the availability of housing. Zoning, its critics say, has also locked in racial segregation and perpetuated environmentally unsustainable land use patterns.

The changes in question include banning single-family-only zoning; allowing multifamily housing in more places, including adjacent to transit stops; reducing or eliminating costly minimum parking requirements; and lifting prohibitions on accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

Efforts to reform zoning have gained momentum in part because the issue is surprisingly bipartisan, attracting supporters ranging from free market conservatives who favor streamlining government regulation to progressives concerned about homelessness and seeking to right racial wrongs.

Not only blue states along the coasts, but others regarded as red, such as Utah, are engaged in some type of zoning reform. In Virginia, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin has been speaking out against NIMBYism, the “not in my backyard” opposition by established residents to new housing development. To address the rising costs residents face, he said shortly after taking office in 2022, “we must tackle the root causes: unnecessary regulation, overburdensome and inefficient local governments, restrictive zoning policies, and an ideology of fighting tooth and nail against any new development.”

The biggest driver of reform has been the lack of affordable housing, which is wreaking havoc with local economies. Home prices rose more than 20 percent nationwide from March 2021 to March 2022. In June 2022, Realtor.com reported that rents in the country’s 50 largest metro areas had jumped 26.6 percent since 2019, the latest in a string of record increases. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 30 percent of all U.S. households had unaffordable rent or mortgage payments in 2020, defined as exceeding 30 percent of monthly household income; a growing number of Americans spend half their income on housing. Workers often can’t live near their places of employment; outright homelessness is increasingly visible.

“Even people who are the beneficiaries of the California housing crisis, maybe folks who bought a home a few decades ago [and have seen their home values appreciate], they’re finding that their adult children can’t live within two or three hours of them. They’re finding that if they want to retire, they probably have to leave the state,” said M. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Whether in California or Utah, Gray said, residents are confronting similar “housing affordability issues that are affecting the middle class—and they’re looking for solutions.”

Still, the effort to apply new standards statewide is facing fierce political opposition at the local level, where land use decisions have historically been made, and where the right to set zoning has been heavily guarded since higher levels of government granted that power a century ago. The resistance warns against “imperialistic rezoning from state capitals,” in the words of one critic, framing the mandates aimed at increasing housing supply as inappropriate state preemption.

Responding to those who oppose any change in local regulations for development, state lawmakers have watered down statewide reform efforts by adding opt-outs or removing penalties for noncompliance. In some cases, the stirrings of reform have been shut down entirely. In Nebraska, a bill requiring municipalities with over 5,000 residents to allow fourplexes and other “missing middle” housing was replaced by a measure requiring only evidence that local jurisdictions were working on creating more affordable housing. (See our state-by-state guide to recent reforms in a dozen states.)

In Massachusetts, the program known as MBTA Communities—signed by Republican Governor Charlie Baker in 2021—requires cities and towns to allow multifamily housing near transit stations by right, with a minimum density of 15 units per acre. But many communities have challenged that mandate—and have indicated they are prepared to do without the state funding that will be withheld if they don’t comply.

If the key to any public policy reform lies in implementation, that may be especially true with something as entrenched as local control over land use. States intent on reform must convince localities that changing zoning in targeted ways is achievable and will be beneficial. Technical assistance and education, facilitated by state agencies and nonprofit organizations, will help, said Massachusetts-based researcher Amy Dain, who has conducted research for the Lincoln Institute and has documented how suburban communities around Boston have erected a “paper wall” of bureaucracy that hobbles attempts by developers to build multifamily housing.

In the case of the MBTA Communities act, she said, “the state is giving cities and towns lots of flexibility in deciding how to draw districts [of greater density] and how to write the requirements. It’s at the local level that the sites for transit-oriented multifamily housing development are selected and the dimensional requirements for new housing are established.”

The success of statewide zoning reform in the future may well hinge on the promise of that kind of state-local collaboration.

THOUGH MANY CITIES have been masterfully planned and designed over the centuries, zoning is a 20th century phenomenon. The need for a framework of rules and regulations emerged as a reaction to explosive growth in U.S. cities after the turn of the century, concurrent with industrialization and the growth of manufacturing; massive immigration; and advances in technology, particularly in the transportation sector, including the streetcar, subway, and automobile.

The call for zoning was part of a progressive campaign to relieve congestion and to improve living conditions and public health—to make sure a tannery was not located right next door to a rooming house, for example. But it was also designed to control where immigrants and people of color could live. The first U.S. cities to create zoning included New York City and Berkeley, California, both circa 1916.

In 1923, the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act provided model legislation states could adapt to grant municipalities the power to dictate land uses. Drafted by a Department of Commerce committee that had been assembled by Herbert Hoover and included Frederick Law Olmsted, the enabling act was adopted by all 50 states. The landmark 1926 Supreme Court case Euclid vs. Ambler Realty, which saw a realty company sue for the right to develop land across several newly implemented zoning districts in an Ohio town, affirmed that zoning was a local responsibility, and indeed a police power to reduce conflicts and improve public health.

The result was that more than 30,000 local governments developed their own regulation of land uses and structures, including allowable height, bulk, floor-to-area ratios, lot sizes, and setbacks. A common approach was separating commercial, industrial, and residential uses, designating parcels by category in multicolored zoning maps that are still in use to this day. On the residential side, zones for single-family homes, often on large lots, were most prevalent; areas set aside for multifamily housing, including even two-family structures, were much smaller, if they existed at all.

Although communities used similar approaches, zoning became a highly decentralized system in which each jurisdiction developed particular rules in complicated formats. “Even for an expert, these zoning codes can be hard to read, and it’s nearly impossible to compare them to each other,” said Cornell University law professor Sara Bronin, who was part of a major zoning reform effort in Connecticut and is now leading the development of the National Zoning Atlas. That crowdsourced project is working to create a user-friendly, interactive zoning map of each state in the country.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ZONING ATLAS

When Sara Bronin, now a Cornell University professor, first got involved in zoning reform in Connecticut, a clear need emerged: identifying what, exactly, the local land use regulations were in the state’s 169 cities and towns. Finding the answer took reviewing 2,622 zoning districts and more than 30,000 pages of text, and using spreadsheets, maps, and geographic information systems to organize everything. That exercise inspired Bronin and her small team of collaborators to launch a more ambitious project: documenting local zoning practices in all 50 states to create a National Zoning Atlas.

The aim of this crowdsourced project is to translate and standardize the country’s zoning codes, building an interactive online map that’s easy for the public to use and understand. The National Zoning Atlas seeks to help broaden participation in land use decisions, identify opportunities for zoning reform, and narrow an information gap that currently favors land speculators, institutional investors, and homeowners over socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. It will also illuminate regional and statewide trends and provide a resource for national planning efforts related to housing production, transportation infrastructure, and climate change.

A growing collaborative of researchers is currently working in 14 states, from New Hampshire to Hawaii. The team welcomes collaborators from all states. To learn more, visit www.zoningatlas.org.

The intensely local nature of zoning created another attribute that has helped effectively lock the rules in place: significant constituencies of established residents who refer to the rules to block new development. Zoning—as well as environmental regulations and, in some cases, historic preservation restrictions—was used as a shield in separated-use suburbs dominated by single-family zoning and in cities, where residents grew wary of redevelopment in tightly knit neighborhoods. Through the 1960s and 1970s, local neighborhood organizations grew stronger using veto power over a wide variety of redevelopment proposals, said Jacob Anbinder, who is writing a dissertation at Harvard about local control and community organizing.

The combination of complicated rules and staunch defenders made the system seem impenetrable. But some of the first challenges to the notion that zoning was sacrosanct—suggestions that local land use regulations had become calcified and obsolete—began emerging about 25 years ago, primarily on an environmental basis.

The smart growth and New Urbanism movements contended that the separation of uses was fostering environmentally damaging car dependence and had made mixed-use, walkable living arrangements essentially illegal.

“If you look at historical prezoning neighborhoods, the standard would be that you would have life’s daily necessities within walking distance,” said Gray. “You might have a corner grocery, you might have a corner barbershop, you might have a corner medical office, or at least cities could achieve densities such that transit would actually work. There was density high enough to be able to take a bus or even to take a train.

“Zoning makes all of that very difficult,” he said. “It really privileges the most environmentally inefficient land use patterns. It’s clear, when you look at the data, that many Americans actually want to live in an apartment, in a walkable neighborhood where they might not have a car—and zoning, in many cases, criminalizes that.”

In what might be described as an initial and more subtle attempt to get communities to reassess their zoning, planner promoting alternatives to sprawl introduced the idea of the “form-based code,” which reoriented zoning around the composition and massing of buildings, instead of focusing on the use and activities that go on inside. Others tried to help small and midsized cities make incremental adjustments that enabled more urban landscapes. “Meeting local governments where they are” was the mantra for the Project for Code Reform initiative launched by the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2016, said Lynn Richards, who was president of the organization at the time. “It was not intended as a full audit, but rather identifying the biggest little change a community could make to improve the regulatory environment in that place,” she said, adding that incremental changes were instituted in Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.

For the most part, however, the status quo remained, even as public awareness of the role of zoning in perpetuating racial segregation grew, adding to concerns about its impact. Historical and demographic research around the country illustrated the damaging and lasting impacts of land use decisions in places from Los Angeles to Manchester, New Hampshire. Local governments that had been handed the responsibility of overseeing land use had failed to ensure equitable and sustainable communities, according to this critique, and were showing no signs of changing their ways.

“A century of decentralized and isolated local control of land produced unacceptable levels of racial and economic segregation, urban sprawl that contributed to the climate crisis, and an almost unassailable housing crisis,” wrote Lincoln Institute President George W. McCarthy in an essay in the October 2022 issue of Land Lines. “It is sometimes necessary for higher levels of government to supersede the decisions of lower levels of government to promote general welfare or address negative externalities that are artifacts of uncoordinated actions at lower levels.”

A FEW CITIES, including Minneapolis and Portland, have been in the vanguard, taking steps to ban single-family-only zoning, for example. A framework of incentives and penalties encouraging denser and more inclusive development has also been floated at the federal level under the Obama and Biden administrations.

The rationale for statewide standards, however, has become increasingly clear: to eliminate the patchwork of different policies and regulations within metropolitan regions. Some communities might allow ADUs, for example, while others prohibit them. A more uniform regulatory regime would level the playing field, reflecting actual homebuying and renting aspirations and making it possible to develop a responsive regional approach to issues like the current affordability crisis.

The zoning reform measures that have passed or are under consideration range from relatively small tweaks, such as legalizing ADUs or eliminating minimum parking requirements, to more significant preemptions that allow multifamily housing, whether two-, three-, or four-family townhomes or larger apartment buildings, in areas zoned exclusively for single-family homes.

California has been a leader, first legalizing ADUs statewide, then allowing duplexes and lot splits in single-family zones, and mixed-income multifamily housing in all commercial areas, while also eliminating minimum parking requirements at transit stations. Connecticut is close behind, with requirements that cities and towns “affirmatively further fair housing” in their zoning, promote diverse housing options, legalize ADUs, and cap minimum parking requirements. The state’s newly adopted guidelines also prevent towns from enacting zoning that discriminates by income, caps the amount of multifamily housing in a community, or charges unreasonable or different fees for multifamily affordable housing.

An additional notable feature in Connecticut is the removal of the terms “character,” “overcrowding of land,” and “undue concentration of population” from state law as legal bases for zoning regulations. In their place, the bill allows towns to consider only the “physical site characteristics” of a district.

Reformers aspire to dig deeper on the issue of process, which has been shown to hinder and discourage new development by making it prohibitively costly. Recommendations include a “shot clock” limiting the length of the permitting process, and exemptions from lengthy review for small or mid-sized projects that clearly don’t have a major environmental impact.

OTHER STATES MULLING ZONING REFORM have included elements from the California and Connecticut reforms. But a pattern has emerged in which lawmakers propose tough measures—disallowing single-family-only zoning, for example—and then, in the face of opposition, prescribe milder reforms, such as lifting prohibitions on renting out carriage houses or apartments over garages.

Lawmakers appear to be responding to a predictable backlash against state mandates, which is premised on the basis that jurisdictions should not be subjected to blanket requirements that don’t fully consider local conditions.

Aaron Renn, a conservative urban analyst and contributing editor for City Journal, said he is “generally supportive of zoning liberalization as a tool to address housing supply shortages,” but is wary of putting states in control of local land use decisions because of the perceived risk that it will lead to one-size-fits-all policies. He expressed concern that state-level advocates of reform “argue that in most cases the upzoning won’t mean wholesale replacement of single-family homes with apartment buildings, but they won’t countenance any limits,” like putting a cap on the number of fourplexes in a neighborhood, and he worries that terms like “transit corridor” aren’t clearly defined.

Kimberly Fiorello, a Republican state representative for the Connecticut towns of Stamford and Greenwich, put it more bluntly, warning against the zoning reform package that was ultimately adopted by the state.

“Handing over local zoning control to ‘experts’ in Hartford should be an affront to anyone who believes in self-government and the right to private property,” she wrote in 2020, when zoning reform efforts led by state officials and the nonprofit coalition Desegregate Connecticut began gaining momentum. Fiorello and other Republicans even called at one point for a state constitutional amendment “to permit municipalities to enact and enforce zoning restrictions without regional or state interference.”

Preemption, in this case overriding local government, has been established as precedent in the area of housing and withstood legal challenges. In Massachusetts, Chapter 40B overrides local zoning to fast-track projects if 25 percent of the proposed units are affordable, in communities where the affordable housing stock is less than 10 percent. The landmark Mount Laurel case, first decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1975, similarly required cities and towns to add their “fair share” of affordable housing as a priority that trumps local land use restrictions. In California, municipalities that don’t meet affordable housing goals are subject to the “builder’s remedy,” wherein developers can propose any housing project and it is automatically approved.

States pursuing meaningful reform thus must strike a balance between forcing compliance through penalties and other means, and supporting cities and towns more gently through the implementation process, assuring them they remain in control as they open up to more housing.

“Zoning has endured because it is embraced by local communities and local people. Planners should work to hold on to that enthusiasm, to give local communities local control, while supporting the myriad efforts to address the shortcomings of zoning in its current form,” said Harvey M. Jacobs, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.

“Do localities need a nudge? Yes. Will they like it? No,” said Jacobs, who has conducted research with the Lincoln Institute on public policy and property rights. He predicts “somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game, between state-imposed standards and local implementation.”

IN THE MEANTIME, cities are acting on their own, with or without state mandates. The list of places approving reforms is growing, from communitywide upzoning in Walla Walla, Washington, to the approval of ADUs and elimination of parking requirements in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently joined the growing list of communities doing away with parking minimums.

Advocates are hoping to build on that momentum, relying in part on data analysis following implementation. Understandably, since this wave of reform efforts is relatively recent, there are few studies that show changes in zoning directly result in more housing affordability or other desirable outcomes.

An analysis of rents for freshly authorized ADUs by the Southern California Association of Governments showed the small-scale housing in five Los Angeles–area counties was affordable to those earning 80 percent of area median income and lower—although in many cases no rent was charged at all, as family members moved in to relieve overcrowding. “That’s essentially affordable housing production at scale and at no cost to the taxpayer,” said Gray, the Arbitrary Lines author. “That’s all just because of removing some of these zoning barriers to ADUs.”

Two working papers by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University determined that zoning that allows multifamily housing is associated with substantially larger population shares of Black and Hispanic residents than zoning for single-family housing—a combined nine percent higher in Greater Boston, and 21 percent in the Twin Cities metro area.

Bronin, who is leading the National Zoning Atlas effort at Cornell, said research she is about to publish found that simply eliminating minimum parking requirements could enable the creation of thousands of additional units of housing in 15 Connecticut cities. The greatest potential was in Bridgeport, the state’s largest city, which eliminated its minimum parking requirements for housing in 2022. “We’re hopeful that will unlock new investment in Bridgeport, which is pretty close to New York City and, like several of the large Connecticut cities, is struggling economically—but that one single reform has a lot of promise for the creation of new housing, which in turn will drive down prices,” Bronin said.

Though there are conflicting studies, some research suggests that increasing housing supply, even at the high end, can ultimately have a downward impact on rents and home prices. The growing consensus among policy makers and economists is that adding different types of housing across a broad region will be beneficial in the long run.

In that sense, those clamoring for even incremental zoning reform are faced with a challenge akin to climate change, which would continue even if all emissions could be halted tomorrow. Market conditions won’t change quickly, but acting now, the argument goes, will set the stage for a less disastrous lack of affordability in the future.

The case can be made on the basis of that long-term economic viability, said Dain, referring to the Massachusetts mandate for upzoning in areas around transit stations. “This isn’t really a technical change, it’s a major adaptive effort for the whole region—to make sure people will all have homes and that the region grows in a sustainable, resilient way.”

Bronin agrees that modifying rules established long ago can lead to big-picture payoffs—even as that is a complicated message to convey, since zoning has for such a long time remained unseen in the background.

“Zoning is the most significant regulatory power of local government,” she said. “It not only governs where we can put housing and factories and parks and shops—it actually has significant impacts on the economy, and even, I think, the very structure of our society.” Recalling the multiyear reform effort in Connecticut, she noted that “when we started . . . we knew that there was a place in the public conversation for zoning and the time was right to link reform of our outdated zoning laws with much better social and economic outcomes that would be beneficial to Connecticut as a whole.

“I think we surprised people in the traction that it gained and the allies that it gained,” she said, noting that Connecticut is known as “the land of steady habits.” Because that culture ultimately opened up to change, she said, she has hope for the reform attempts underway in other places: “I’m pretty optimistic about these efforts.”

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Image: A protester urges Connecticut lawmakers to “keep zoning local” in 2021, shortly before the state passed comprehensive zoning reform legislation. Credit: Kassi Jackson, Hartford Courant/Tribune News Service.

Related Content

 Land Matters Podcast: The Quest for Zoning Zen

En ocasiones, se considera que la zonificación es un elemento atemporal de las políticas de suelo y la planificación. Y lo es. La zonificación se originó en Asia hace más de tres milenios. En aquella época, se usaba para designar los usos del suelo más allá de las murallas de las ciudades o para separar a las personas por castas. La práctica se adoptó más recientemente en los Estados Unidos con fines similares. En el s. XXI, es uno de los mayores impedimentos para la sostenibilidad de las ciudades estadounidenses.

Hace varios años que expreso mi opinión sobre el control hiperlocal del suelo. Hace una década, en un panel con Nic Retsinas, entonces director del Joint Center for Housing Studies de Harvard, opiné que el gobierno local y los controles del uso del suelo eran “dinosaurios” que hacían casi imposible coordinar la planificación del transporte regional y los esfuerzos en materia de vivienda asequible. Nic nos recordó a mí y a los asistentes que había fuerzas políticas y económicas poderosas que se interponían con firmeza en el camino hacia la reforma de las políticas de suelo. También señaló que los dinosaurios vivieron millones de años antes de extinguirse, y que se extinguieron debido a la colisión de un asteroide con la Tierra, no a causa de la selección natural.

Pero ahora, el mundo de las políticas de suelo presenta algo casi tan raro como un asteroide que cambiará el planeta: el acuerdo bipartidista. Numerosos estados azules, rojos y púrpuras aprobaron leyes para impedir la zonificación local y así avanzar en objetivos políticos esenciales, o están contemplando la posibilidad de hacerlo. ¿Por qué se dio este cambio repentino? Porque muchos gestores de políticas ahora entienden que la crisis nacional de la vivienda asequible no puede abordarse sin cambios estructurales en las reglas. Otros gestores de políticas saben que no podemos abordar una de las manifestaciones más negativas de la zonificación (la segregación espacial por raza y clase) sin una acción afirmativa agresiva.

Si bien hay un acuerdo bipartidista sobre la necesidad de una reforma, las motivaciones de los gestores de políticas son muy diferentes. Los partidarios de la derecha argumentan que la crisis de la vivienda es producto del exceso de regulaciones que ahogan la producción de viviendas. Estos críticos creen que la reforma de la zonificación desatará fuerzas del mercado que harán frente a la crisis de la vivienda y acelerarán la producción de unidades nuevas. Los partidarios de la izquierda argumentan que no podemos construir viviendas asequibles en los lugares que más lo necesitan, debido a las políticas de suelo que excluyeron a las personas por motivos de raza e ingresos durante generaciones, como el tamaño mínimo de las parcelas y la prohibición de las viviendas multifamiliares. Según ellos, la reforma de la zonificación posibilitará la construcción de viviendas asequibles en lugares que presentan “grandes oportunidades”, con buenas escuelas y trabajos decentes.

El poder del Estado para impedir la zonificación local no es nuevo. En 1969, Massachusetts aprobó el Capítulo 40B, una medida que le permite al Estado anular la zonificación local y aprobar desarrollos multifamiliares de ingresos mixtos en jurisdicciones con pocas viviendas asequibles. Aunque contribuyó a fomentar el desarrollo de viviendas asequibles en algunos suburbios adinerados, no supuso un cambio significativo y pocos estados se plantearon seguir su ejemplo, hasta hace muy poco.

Ahora, unos diez estados están dispuestos a impedir la zonificación local a fin de permitir el desarrollo de múltiples unidades de vivienda en lotes que actualmente están zonificados para casas unifamiliares. Por ejemplo, en Connecticut, Nebraska, Utah, Oregón, Maryland, California y Washington, se permite añadir unidades accesorias (ADU, por su sigla en inglés) a los lotes unifamiliares; en Virginia, Utah, Nebraska, Washington y Maryland, se permite la construcción de “viviendas intermedias”, es decir, casas adosadas para entre dos y cuatro familias, en lotes destinados a viviendas unifamiliares; y en Oregón, California, Virginia, Maine y Washington, se impide por completo que los gobiernos locales prohíban la construcción de viviendas multifamiliares en parcelas unifamiliares. Recientemente, Massachusetts y California también ordenaron la recalificación en comunidades con mayor acceso a servicios de transporte. Está claro que el control local sobre el uso del suelo ya no es algo sacrosanto.

Si bien la zonificación es una práctica milenaria, tiene menos de un siglo en la mayor parte de los Estados Unidos. Los estados comenzaron a otorgarles a los municipios el poder de definir el uso del suelo en la década de 1920, en función de la Ley de Habilitación de Zonificación Estatal Estándar dictada por el Departamento de Comercio en 1923. Pero los estados también pueden dar marcha atrás una vez que otorgan derechos. A veces, resulta necesario que los niveles más altos de gobierno pasen por alto las decisiones de los niveles más bajos, a fin de fomentar el bienestar general o abordar cuestiones externas negativas que son producto de acciones no coordinadas de estos niveles más bajos de gobierno. Muchas veces, los esfuerzos estatales para desestimar a los gobiernos locales no son bienintencionados; por ejemplo, cuando los gestores de políticas estatales restringen los impuestos a la propiedad inmobiliaria para congraciarse con los votantes. En el caso de la zonificación, la necesidad de que el estado actúe está claramente justificada.

Deberíamos celebrar el hecho de que estamos yendo en la dirección correcta y que se está generando la voluntad política para abordar un desafío que, hasta hace poco, se consideraba imposible. Pero aún nos queda mucho por aprender sobre la zonificación. Cada estado, y en muchos casos cada jurisdicción dentro de él, desarrolló sus propias convenciones de zonificación, lo que hace que sea muy difícil comparar las prácticas. También hace que sea casi imposible comprender las implicaciones de las decisiones de zonificación sobre el valor del suelo y los patrones de desarrollo, o cómo la reforma de la zonificación podría abordar desafíos grandes, como la crisis de la vivienda, la desigualdad espacial o la expansión urbana descontrolada. Esto también está cambiando.

El año pasado, un pequeño equipo de visionarios en la Universidad Cornell, liderados por la profesora Sara Bronin, crearon un mapa de zonificación para el estado de Connecticut. Mediante hojas de cálculo, mapas y sistemas de información geográfica, el equipo documentó de manera increíblemente detallada las prácticas de zonificación de 180 jurisdicciones con 2.622 distritos de zonificación. Asombrosamente, esto requirió la revisión de más de 30.000 páginas de texto en las que se describían las prácticas de zonificación de un solo estado.

Esta tarea hercúlea aparentemente no fue un desafío lo suficientemente grande para este intrépido grupo de investigadores. Recientemente, el equipo de Cornell emprendió un esfuerzo para crear un Mapa de zonificación nacional. Ahora, con una metodología probada en el campo tras la creación del Mapa de zonificación de Connecticut, se propusieron recopilar, con ayuda del público, datos de zonificación del resto de país mediante los mismos métodos. Hasta ahora, participan equipos autoorganizados de 12 estados. Cuando logren crear el mapa nacional (y el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo hará todo lo posible para que esto suceda), comenzará una nueva era para los académicos de políticas de suelo. Los debates sobre los costos, los beneficios y las consecuencias de la reforma de la zonificación tendrán sustento en datos reales.

La reforma de la zonificación por sí sola no es suficiente para resolver la crisis nacional de la vivienda, pero es necesaria. Es importante que contemos con más información sobre las prácticas de zonificación actuales y los posibles beneficios de las prácticas de zonificación mejoradas para abordar los problemas generados durante décadas de malas prácticas. Un siglo de control local, descentralizado y aislado del suelo produjo niveles inaceptables de segregación racial y económica, una expansión urbana descontrolada que contribuyó a la crisis climática y una crisis de vivienda asequible casi inexpugnable. Mediante la alineación sin precedentes de la voluntad política con las herramientas y conocimientos nuevos, las soluciones posibles a esta triple amenaza están más cerca que nunca. 

Crédito de la imagen: Mapa de Zonificación Nacional

Assessing all the climate threats that rain down on West Africa, the mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, was convinced that extreme heat needed to be a top priority.

“There are more deaths from extreme heat than there are from the more visible and tangible disasters,” she said on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. “In our case, the vulnerable are mainly those living in informal settlements. That’s 35 percent of our city’s population, and in those informal settlements, the housing structures are typically made from corrugated iron. With increased temperatures, you’re effectively living in an oven.”

The concern led Aki-Sawyerr to appoint Africa’s first chief heat officer, with the support of the Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. One of the first practical interventions was to provide shade covers at the city’s open-air markets, where primarily women sit in the sun for long hours.

In a wide-ranging interview, also available at Land Lines magazine as the latest installment of the Mayor’s Desk feature, Aki-Sawyerr said the aim is to build resilience for impacts being felt now, but also plan for long-range sustainability. She detailed the promise to plant a million trees and the planning initiative she launched after being elected in 2018, Transform Freetown.

Aki-Sawyerr, who previously served as head of the Freetown City Council, built her career as a finance professional. She was part of the campaign against blood diamonds and was instrumental in the response to the Ebola crisis in 2014. She has delivered two TED talks, including one about turning dissatisfaction into action. Named to the Time100 Next list of emerging leaders, she has been active in the C40 Cities global network.

As part of an effort to maintain not only environmental but fiscal sustainability, she also explained how the city overhauled its property tax assessment and collection practices.

The Lincoln Institute has been active in Africa, working with governments, scholars, and practitioners on issues like climate change, the property tax, and the fiscal health of local governments, and on using value capture to fund affordable housing and many other priorities.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

Africa’s first “chief heat officer” says Freetown could be a data-driven climate model (Quartz)

Meet the 7 chief heat officers who are making their cities more resilient (Fast Company)

Collaborating to reform Freetown’s property tax system (Institute of Development Studies)

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Image: Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, center, celebrates the installation of marketplace shades designed to combat extreme heat. Credit: City of Freetown.

Where should new multifamily housing go? This is a fundamental question facing 175 communities across eastern Massachusetts as they work to implement a new law intended to address the region’s housing shortage. The law requires cities and towns served by Greater Boston’s public transit agency, the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority), to enact zoning that allows multifamily housing near transit.  

If history is any indication, communities will seek to locate new housing away from existing residential neighborhoods. In recent decades, the largest portion of new housing in Greater Boston has been built in isolated areas on municipal and metropolitan peripheries. As an example, the town of Wellesley approved the construction of a 262-unit complex called The Nines—separated from almost all of the town by Interstate 95 and located on a spit of land tucked between the highway, state Route 9, and the Charles River. The towns of Needham and Stoneham permitted similar “across the interstate” developments, and other examples abound. 

The next largest portion of residential permitting has come in commercial areas.  As “smart growth” caught on in the new millennium, many cities and towns added one or two small- or medium-sized multifamily buildings to their downtowns. These properties are very close to residential neighborhoods, but not right in them. Zoning for mixed-use developments along decaying strip mall corridors has also been gaining support. Thus, we see projects on Newton’s Needham Street, Bedford’s Great Road, Salem’s Highland Avenue, Swampscott’s Vinnin Square, and many other less-than-loved “stroads.”  

For many communities, preserving the status quo of existing neighborhoods has been an explicit priority, even as the housing crunch has intensified. A few years ago, the city of Weymouth rezoned a commercial corridor for mixed-use multifamily housing, drawing the zoning district surgically to avoid development near existing residential neighborhoods. Wellesley’s 2018 Draft Unified Plan explains that participants in public meetings saw commercial, office, and industrial areas as the most acceptable locations for multifamily housing; not residential districts. In fact, my review of local master plans across 100 cities and towns showed no movement to upzone residential neighborhoods, other than by allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which appear to have relatively popular support.  

Given the political resistance to changing residential neighborhoods, developing housing in other areas is not without merit. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council, the regional planning agency, recently analyzed more than 3,000 strip malls and shopping centers across Greater Boston, and estimated that such sites could accommodate 124,000 new homes. Between those areas and various office parks and industrial lands, Greater Boston could raise enough residential towers and townhouses to end bidding wars, giving renters and buyers the upper hand, without changing existing residential neighborhoods.   

However, the strategy of rezoning exclusively commercial and industrial areas assumes that the only goal is housing production. Metropolitan growth policy also needs to consider transportation, the environment, local economies, quality of life, and equity.  

The transit-oriented development (TOD) paradigm at the heart of Massachusetts’s new MBTA Communities Zoning Law imagines a region defined by a network of walkable, dense hubs that are well-connected by roads, walkways, bike lanes, bus lanes, train lines, and ferry routes. Under this scenario, people will spend less time in traffic; convenient region-wide mobility will be accessible to all residents, including those without cars; carbon emissions will go down; more people will have access to the region’s best opportunities; and our collective well-being and resilience will improve.  

One of Greater Boston’s most prominent strengths is that it was built as a network of urban villages well connected by trains and streetcars before automobiles began dominating urban design. The framework for the vision of well-connected “great neighborhoods” is already on the ground. The metropolitan area is crisscrossed with village centers and downtowns that contain pharmacies, libraries, restaurants, cafes, civic institutions, schools, playgrounds, public greens, quirky shops, and transit stops.  

If we write off as unchangeable all residential neighborhoods adjacent to these great hubs, then we make it harder to achieve the combined goals of an abundance of housing and sustainable, equitable settlement patterns. There is great demand in Greater Boston for “missing middle” housing that fits between single family-houses-with-yards and bigger apartment/condo complexes. For development of smaller scale multifamily housing to serve many people and make a difference in the market, it has to be allowed in more places.  

The project to create more housing in the Boston area will involve a combination of strategies, including significantly more building on main streets and the currently car-oriented corridors that radiate out from them; continued building on some isolated parcels on municipal edges; and incremental increases in density near connected, walkable hubs—i.e., in existing residential neighborhoods. Significant development on isolated parcels and strip mall corridors should be accompanied by infrastructure redesign to create connected, walkable hubs.   

As they consider different development scenarios that meet the requirements of the MBTA Communities zoning law, leaders and residents will need to weigh the politics and pros and cons of dense zoning in commercial and industrial areas, against zoning for small-scale multifamily housing in neighborhoods. Their deliberations will be part of a larger national debate about how regions should grow. 

Many people will be anxious about the possibility of multifamily development next to their homes. They’ll worry about traffic and parking, property values, architecture, noise, privacy, and all sorts of things. But we could just as well associate new housing with the chocolate chip cookies the future residents might bake for block parties, the leadership they might take on local issues, and the purple pansies they might plant out front in big happy planters. We could think of the joy, stability, and safety that new neighbors will gain in, and contribute to, our neighborhoods.  

Humans are perhaps wired to protect against threats more than to revel in visions of possibility, but we are also well equipped to plan ahead, together. We should plan for a just and sustainable future with abundant housing in wonderful, connected neighborhoods—and reform local zoning accordingly. 

Amy Dain is an independent consultant in public policy research and writing. Her focus is on urban and suburban planning and housing policy. She has conducted research for the Lincoln Institute on zoning and approval processes for multifamily housing in the Greater Boston area. 

Image: Construction in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts. Credit: Amy Dain.

Mayor Yvonne Denise Aki-Sawyerr took office in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in May 2018, after serving as head of the Freetown City Council. A finance professional with over 25 years of experience in the public and private sectors, she had previously been involved with the campaign against blood diamonds and was instrumental in the response to the Ebola crisis in 2014. She has delivered two TED talks, about turning dissatisfaction into action and the capital city’s initiative to plant a million trees, and was named to the Time 100 Next list of emerging leaders and the BBC’s 100 Women list.

A leader in the C40 Cities global network, Aki-Sawyerr launched the Transform Freetown planning initiative and appointed Africa’s first chief heat officer, to confront the impacts of climate change. She holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Freetown’s Fourah Bay College, and is married with two children. She spoke with Senior Fellow Anthony Flint in the fall. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Flint: Could you talk about the Transform Freetown initiative as a planning and action framework, and your assessment of its progress?

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: I ran for office in 2018, motivated by concerns around the environment and sanitation. My campaign message, “for community, for progress, for Freetown,” translated into Transform Freetown. It focuses on four categories: resilience, human development, healthy city, and urban mobility.

Resilience includes environmental management; it also includes urban planning, because you cannot separate the two, and revenue organization, because sustainability will only come from the city’s ability to sustain and generate revenue itself. The healthy city cluster includes sanitation, which goes very closely with environmental management for Freetown and many African cities. If you think about climate change, our teeny-weeny contribution to climate change, a lot of it actually comes from methane, from open dumping, but it also has huge health implications. So in the healthy city category was sanitation, health, and water.

What we did was, having come into office with those high-level areas of concern, we had 322 focus groups with about 15,000 residents to get their views on affordability, accessibility, and availability of services across those sectors. We invited the public sector, private sector, and the international community via development partners and NGOs to participate in roundtable discussions.

Out of that process came 19 specific, measurable targets that we’re working toward under Transform Freetown. We report against them every year back to the city, back to our residents. It really has been a way of introducing greater accountability, of holding our own feet to the fire, and it’s very much community owned and community driven.

AF: Among all the climate threats the city faces, you appointed a chief heat officer. Why was a chief heat officer necessary and what have been the results thus far?

YA: I’m asked often, how do you get ordinary people interested in climate change? In our case it’s not hard, because the consequences of climate change are intensely felt in our parts of the world. We suffer greatly from flooding and landslides, hence my concern with the environment and being able to mitigate those impacts.

The [Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center] really got us thinking about the fact that there are more deaths from extreme heat than there are from the more visible and tangible disasters like the floods and landslides. Extreme heat, particularly where water is in short supply, is a major impact of the warming climate.

In our case, the vulnerable are mainly those living in informal settlements. That’s 35 percent of our city’s population, and in those informal settlements, the housing structures are typically made from corrugated iron. With increased temperatures, you’re effectively living in an oven. The other aspect of that is we have an informal economy. Around 60 percent of women in our city are involved in trading. Most of our markets are outdoors, so you’re sitting in the sun all day long. Doing that under the intense heat means that [other] negative health consequences are exacerbated.

With the chief heat officer, we now are going to be able to embark on some research, collecting data to identify the heat islands; anecdotally, we have a sense of where those are, mainly in the informal settlements, but potentially also in the middle of the city. We need to be able to make arguments to challenge what’s going on with the lack of building permits, and land use planning being devolved to the city, and the massive deforestation that continues unabated.

The chief heat officer has worked with market women and gotten funding from Arsht-Rock to install market shade covers in three of our open markets. It’s great to see the enthusiasm of the women and them saying, “Are we going to get this all the way along the market? We can see where it’s starting, where it stops, but we need it too.”

AF: What are your hopes for other climate mitigation projects, including the initiative to plant a million trees? How did that come about, and how is it going?

YA: Well, it came about because there’s an appreciation that we were losing our vegetation and that [worsens] the effect of extreme weather events, [as when heavy rains led to massive mudslides in 2017]. The lack of forestation is a major part of that. The goal is to increase vegetation cover by 50 percent.

Planting the million trees is the long-term plan, but in the meantime, you still have the runoff from the mountains filling the drains with silt. Our annual flood mitigation work identifies the worst of these areas and clears the silt so that when the rains come, the water can still flow. On a smaller scale, we’ve also been able to build something like 2,000 meters of drainage in smaller communities. Beyond that, we’ve invested heavily in disaster management training and capacity building.

The thing about climate change impacts is they are really pervasive. If people are experiencing crop failure outside of Freetown, it will eventually drive a rural-urban migration because they’re unable to sustain their livelihoods and they’re going to come to the city looking for some means of making a living.

That pressure of population growth in the city is something else that we have to deal with—whether it’s introducing the cable car to improve transportation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions [or encouraging] the government to devolve land use planning and building permit functions so that we can actually introduce land management actions, which save life and save property but also protect the environment and prevent people from building properties in waterways and streams and canals, which currently happens. All of this is made worse by not using legislation and urban management tools such as land use planning and building permitting in a constructive manner.

AF: Could you describe Freetown’s property tax reform efforts, and the outcomes you’ve seen, in the overall context of municipal fiscal health?

YA: We worked on this property tax reform moving from 37,000 properties in the database of a city that’s a capital city with at least 1.2 to 1.5 million people—37,000 properties. When I came in, it was clear that that was not reflective of reality, but also the manual system that they operated, literally with a ledger book, was not really fit for purpose in the 21st century.

One of our 19 targets is to increase property tax income fivefold. To go about doing that, we secured funding and partnerships to digitize. We changed from an area-based system to a point-based system. We worked on that by taking a satellite image of the entire city and building an algorithm to give weightings to features [like roofs, windows, and location], then comparing that against a database of 3,000 properties whose values were determined by real charter surveyors. We got the old-type assessment done. We were able to identify outliers and refine the model and eventually build a model which we now use as our property base.

Through that process, we moved from 37,000 properties to over 120,000 properties. That meant we were able to meet our target of increasing our property tax revenue from [$425,000 to over $2 million]. That in itself is the pathway to sustainability and being able to invest.

A big part of fiscal health is that sustainability, but . . . unfortunately, the Ministry of Local Government [halted collections while developing national tax reform guidelines]. We were without revenue for about a year. We have started re-collecting, but as you can imagine, compliance levels will take a long time to recover.

AF: Where do you find inspiration in the face of so many challenges?

YA: From the fact that we have been able to make a difference in the lives of Freetonians. We’ve been able to test and to see how much can be achieved if one is given the space to do so. We know that so much is possible and so we keep going.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Lead image: Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Columbus, Ohio, invented the first known off-street parking requirement for an apartment building in 1923. After nearly a hundred years, the results are in, and they’re not good. 

Last year, an assessment of the local zoning code—commissioned by the city as part of a comprehensive code revision process—concluded that off-street parking requirements were “not effective” and “often poorly matched to true parking demand.” 

That mismatch has gotten worse over time. Today’s parking requirements in Columbus are far higher than their cousins from the city’s midcentury zoning code. In 1954, an apartment building with 100 one-bedroom units was required to have 100 parking spaces; today it has to have 150. For a 2,500-square-foot restaurant, nine required parking spaces became 34, in the 90 percent of the city not covered by special overlay districts. These ratios are out of step with the local market, leading builders to request parking reductions more than any other type of zoning variance. City and regional plans have recommended reducing parking requirements and making them more consistent. 

Columbus is not alone. Across the United States, decades of similar parking requirements have led to a glut: researchers estimate that for every car in the country, there are at least three parking spaces—and some have suggested the number is closer to eight spaces.  

This oversupply has created a host of problems: parking requirements can inflate housing costs, block buildings from being adapted to new uses, and contribute to sprawl, making additional driving (and parking) necessary. They create an administrative burden. And the impervious surfaces of parking lots increase the risk of flooding and contribute to the urban heat island effect. 

But there is good news: of all the harms traditional zoning has inflicted on communities, parking requirements are the easiest to fix, said Sara Bronin, former chair of the Hartford, Connecticut, Planning and Zoning Commission. Bronin was at the helm in 2017, when Hartford became one of the first cities in the United States to eliminate residential and commercial parking mandates. The year before, city leaders had tested the waters by eliminating requirements in the downtown area, a move that yielded new development projects and new proposals for reuse. “Every community should be eliminating their parking requirements,” Bronin said.  

Each year, more cities are eliminating or reducing such mandates. In 2021, cities from Minneapolis to Jackson, Tennessee, eliminated minimum parking requirements from their zoning codes. In the week that this article was drafted alone, cities from Spokane to Chicago to Burlington, Vermont, rolled back parking mandates. 

Communities might reduce their parking requirements because they are trying to reinvent themselves by attracting new businesses and development, accommodate population growth with space-efficient infill, or focus more on transit and walkability. Regardless of the reason, parking reform advocates say this land use regulation could finally be on its way out. 

“We’re going to look back at this as just this weird, late-20th century aberration,” predicts Patrick Siegman, an economist and planner who has been studying parking since 1992, including as a partner at the national transportation planning firm Nelson Nygaard. “We created something wildly inefficient.” 

Hartford Leads the Way 

Like many industrial cities in the United States, Hartford saw dramatic population decline during the second half of the 20th century. In 1960, half of the people working in Hartford lived there, many walking or taking transit to jobs downtown; by 1980, less than a quarter of its workforce called the city home. Many white residents had fled for the suburbs and the overall population was declining. The repercussions of this demographic and economic shift are visible in the city’s bounty of parking lots: to accommodate the increase in car commuters, the city essentially paved over swaths of its downtown. 

As historian Daniel Sterner put it, “Hartford is famous for having so much torn down.” Not even the city’s first skyscraper, built in 1912, survived the demolition boom. It was razed to make way for a taller office tower, but those plans were abandoned in 1990 as the country entered a recession. The prominent corner lot became, and remains, surface parking. 

University of Connecticut professor Norman Garrick and his team found that from 1960 to 2000, the amount of land dedicated to parking lots in the downtown business district tripled, nearly equaling the amount of land underneath all the adjacent buildings. “The increase in parking was part of the collapse of the city,” Garrick said. “It’s typical of a lot of American cities.” 

Even without the research, there was little debate that Hartford had an oversupply of parking. “I don’t think every city needs a full-on parking history, or parking analysis,” said Bronin. “Most people should be able to just look around and say, ‘there’s a lot of parking in this city.’” 

The overabundance of parking came at a great cost for the city, Garrick’s team found in a report released in 2014. They estimated that the city was missing out on property tax revenue to the tune of $1,200 per downtown parking space, or about $50 million a year. That was a significant amount for a city whose downtown buildings were generating $75 million in annual tax revenue. 

Attracting investment is critically important for Connecticut’s capital city—and particularly challenging. More than half of the city’s real estate is nontaxable, because the land is owned by the government or nonprofit institutions. The rest is subject to the highest property tax rate in the state. Eliminating parking requirements citywide is one way to create a more flexible, inviting environment for development. 

“It’s easy to say we have no parking minimums, as opposed to ‘what zone?’,” said Aaron Gill, current vice chair of Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The biggest hurdle now is convincing developers they have new options, Gill said. He encourages developers to revisit parcels they might have discounted in the past, and to review how much parking is actually being used in previous developments.  

The strategy seems to be working. The quasi-public Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) has funded more than 2,800 new homes downtown since 2012, aiming to build a critical mass of residents to support retail and other services. Mike Freimuth, executive director of the CRDA, said the new zoning code has helped reduce costs and increased the use of existing parking garages. 

One of the CRDA projects, Teachers Village, involved converting an office building that had been vacant for 20 years into housing for area educators. Thirty percent of the apartments were designated as affordable. Prior to the code change, more than one parking space would have been required for each unit, but the renovated building has only 18 underground parking spaces for 60 households. The spaces are leased separately from the apartments, saving money for those who don’t need a parking spot. According to estimates based on 2016 Census data, more than 30 percent of Hartford households don’t even own a car. 

Other redevelopment projects have cut deals with adjacent parking garages, which are also adapting to the new world of remote work, to provide an off-street parking option for residents for an additional fee. Two derelict commercial buildings on Pearl Street, which Freimuth used to joke were the largest pigeon coops in the state, went that route when the buildings were renovated into 258 new homes. A few blocks away, a former Steiger’s department store is being converted into 97 new apartments with commercial space below. 

The CRDA is also involved in an ambitious project known as Bushnell South, which aims to convert a 20-acre area dominated by surface parking into a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood with up to 1,200 apartments and townhouses, restaurants and retail, green space, and cultural attractions. The city was reviewing proposals from developers this summer with the goal of moving forward this fall. Although some developers have expressed concern that the city is building more residential space than the market can support, Freimuth is eager to proceed. “This land has been laying fallow for 50 years,” he told the Hartford Courant. “Why do we have to keep on waiting?” 

The Benefits of a Citywide Shift 

On the edge of downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas, a building that had stood vacant for nearly 40 years now houses a local restaurant with a rooftop patio. Down the road, a formerly abandoned gas station is back in use as retail space. The reuse of these once-forgotten properties was made possible several years ago, when Fayetteville’s city council voted to remove commercial parking requirements citywide. 

While most cities start with reducing parking mandates in a central business district, like Hartford did, planners in Fayetteville were fielding requests about properties throughout the city, and opted against defining a smaller boundary. At 44 square miles, Fayetteville is nearly 2.5 times larger than Hartford, with 70 percent of the population. 

“As a city planner, you receive phone calls about what’s possible with this property,” Fayetteville planner Quin Thompson explained. “What I began to see was the same properties over and over again. Some of those properties were downtown, but a lot weren’t.” None of the parcels had enough space to meet the parking requirements in place at the time. 

The planning staff approached the city council with the idea of eliminating commercial requirements citywide. Some of these properties were so constrained, they explained, it was impossible to imagine how they could be redeveloped under the current rules. They also said investors taking on the financial risk of a project were best suited to determine their own parking needs, and would act as a backstop even when the city was no longer regulating off-street parking spaces. In October 2015, Fayetteville’s city council agreed. 

What happened next? “The buildings that I had identified as being perpetually and perhaps permanently unusable were very quickly purchased, redeveloped, and are in use right now,” said Thompson. “I can’t think of any that are still out there that I had used as case studies that haven’t been redeveloped.” 

Thompson and his colleagues were right that the distinction between parking needs in a central city versus outlying neighborhoods can be arbitrary. In the lead-up to the removal of parking requirements in Edmonton in 2020, a citywide study of 277 sites found no clear geographic trend that related to how full parking lots were, even after factoring in variables like population density, walkability as measured by Walk Score, or drive-alone rate. Of all the sites surveyed, only 7 percent neared capacity at the busiest times of day. It was far more common for parking lots to remain half empty, as was the case for 47 percent of observed sites. 

In Fayetteville and other cities, eliminating parking minimums citywide has had another benefit: reducing administrative work and freeing up city staff to work on other things. “One of the things you find in American cities is that they’ve got all of these college-educated planners, many of whom actually have graduate degrees, and what they’re doing is spending hour after hour processing parking variances,” explained Siegman. 

Kevin Robinson was one of those planners, until he was hired as director of Planning and Development Services for Albemarle, North Carolina. To his surprise, the city had almost no parking requirements, having eliminated virtually all of them two decades prior. “However you came about it,” he recalls telling city officials, “I think you’re on the right track.” 

Towns where he had worked previously had only reduced parking requirements in central business districts, not citywide. “From an administrative standpoint, it’s a heck of a lot easier to deal with,” said Robinson. “Quite honestly, a lot of times [parking minimums] are very arbitrary numbers,” Robinson said. Now that he no longer has to enforce them, he has more time to spend on other aspects of development—including a downtown parking plan. He has plenty of data to rebut complaints that there isn’t enough parking. Even at peak hours, public parking never gets more than half full, his heatmaps indicate. 

Robinson acknowledges that eliminating parking minimums wasn’t a cure-all: “We are still seeing far more parking being built than is absolutely necessary.” (See sidebar to learn how the shift has played out in other cities.) Construction in Albemarle is picking up as people get priced out of nearby cities like Charlotte. In the last two years, this small city of 16,000 has approved permits for 3,000 new housing units, with another 1,000 in the works, including middle housing like duplexes and townhouses. 

Robinson is nervous that the parking requirements, which were discarded at a time when the city wasn’t growing, might return as development accelerates. “I’m trying to keep them from going in that direction,” he said. His concerns aren’t unfounded. 

When Mandates Make a U-Turn 

It took almost a decade for a new apartment building with no parking to arrive in Portland after the city waived requirements near transit in 2002. The political backlash came more swiftly. As Portland’s rental market tightened, the city found itself with the second-lowest vacancy rate in the country in 2012. Apartment construction was booming, and buildings without off-street parking were becoming increasingly common. 

Then controversy erupted. The epicenter was a 13-block section of Division Street, a car-oriented commercial corridor experiencing a building boom. By the time the issue made it to the front pages of Willamette Week, the local weekly paper, 11 new multifamily buildings were under development, seven with no parking at all.  

A city-commissioned survey of 115 residents of new apartment buildings would show that 72 percent of the respondents owned cars, with the majority parking on neighborhood streets. Even though the same survey showed that the areas around the buildings had plenty of available parking, neighbors didn’t perceive it that way.  

Mayor Charlie Hales, who had championed the removal of parking mandates as a council member in 2002, even floated the idea of instituting a building moratorium until the zoning code could be sorted out. Hales told Willamette Week that he had anticipated developers might build one parking spot instead of two, but hadn’t imagined banks would finance housing with no parking at all. 

In response to the outcry, Portland’s city council reinstituted a parking requirement for multifamily developments with more than 30 units. Those larger buildings would need to provide one parking space for every three or four units, depending on the building size. “That was the strategic retreat,” Hales explained. “We decided to adjust our ideal slightly to a watered-down version in order to reduce the controversy.” 

Hales, who is no longer mayor, still believes strongly in eliminating parking requirements. “There’s some things we really don’t need to regulate,” he said recently. “Minimum number of parking spaces is one of them.” Given the political pressure of the time, he has a hard time imagining how things could have worked out differently. 

While supporters of parking mandates prevailed in that case, the matter was far from settled. Several years after the 2013 brouhaha, regulated affordable housing near transit regained its exemption from parking requirements, after rising rents and economic displacement prompted Portland to declare a housing state of emergency and elect a tenant advocate to city council. Portland adopted an inclusionary zoning policy that same year, requiring multifamily buildings to set aside units for affordable housing—and waiving residential parking requirements for those buildings. 

Looking back, Portland activist Tony Jordan, who went on to launch the national Parking Reform Network, thinks the city was foolish to derail the housing construction wave. “Why would you do anything” to make developers think twice about investing in larger buildings, he asked. The way the code was written, adding one more unit to a 30-unit building came with “a penalty of six parking spaces, incentivizing builders to stay under the limit. “Even if we only lost 60 apartments,” he said, “that’s a housing subsidy that we just threw away—and for what?” 

Communities with No Parking Minimums 

According to the Parking Reform Network, the following communities do not have citywide minimum parking requirements (dates of implementation indicated when known). Learn more about these and other changes to U.S. parking mandates at www.parkingreform.org. 

• California: Alameda (2021), San Francisco (2018), Emeryville (2019) 

• Connecticut: Bridgeport (2022), Hartford (2017) 

• Georgia: Dunwoody (2019) 

• Indiana: South Bend (2021) 

• Michigan: Ann Arbor (2022), Mancelona, Ecorse (2020), River Rouge (2021) 

• Minnesota: Minneapolis (2021), St. Paul (2021) 

• Missouri: Branson 

• New Hampshire: Seabrook (2019), Dover (2015) 

• New York: Buffalo (2017), Canandaigua, Hudson (2019), Saranac Lake (2016) 

• North Carolina: Raleigh (2022) 

• Tennessee: Jackson (2021) 

• Texas: Bandera, Bastrop (2019) 

• Alberta: Edmonton (2020), High River (2021) 

Stopping Parking Spillover 

When parking complaints bubbled up in Portland’s Northwest neighborhood in 2016, the city was ready to try a different strategy: directly managing on-street parking. A local parking advisory committee had petitioned Portland’s city council to apply the citywide parking requirements to the growing district, which had historically been exempted. But when a study showed that those regulations would have made 23 percent of newly constructed homes in the neighborhood illegal, the council opted to improve the district’s fledgling parking permit program instead. 

“When city staff manage on-street parking properly, they can prevent that on-street parking from getting overcrowded with a 99 percent success rate,” said Siegman, who has spent much of his career studying spillover parking concerns. The problem, he said, is that almost no one has training in how to manage street parking in a way that is both effective and politically popular. On-street parking management is not part of the core curriculum for planners or transportation engineers. 

“What you’re essentially doing with on-street parking spaces is taking a valuable resource that belongs to the public and setting up rights to determine who gets to use it,” said Siegman. Any hotel manager knows that once the keys are gone, there is no vacancy. Yet cities often hand out multiple residential permits for every street space, and wait until the problem is so bad that neighbors have to petition for curbside management. When a neighborhood has more drivers seeking permits than there are on-street spaces, there are a number of ways to ensure balance. Boundaries for a parking district could exclude new buildings or households with driveways, or restrict the number of permits to the street frontage of the lot—forcing developers and incoming residents to make a plan for storing cars off-site.

Left to the Market, How Much Parking Gets Built? 

In Buffalo, New York, which struck down parking requirements in April 2017, a review of 36 major developments showed that 53 percent of projects still opted to include at least as many parking spaces as the previous code had required. The developers who did propose building less parking averaged 60 fewer parking spaces than the old minimum required, avoiding over eight acres of unnecessary asphalt and saving up to $30 million in construction costs. 

Seattle saw similar results after eliminating parking requirements near transit in 2012. A study of 868 residential developments permitted in the following five years found that 70 percent of new buildings in areas not subject to parking requirements still chose to have on-site parking. Collectively, the new buildings included 40 percent fewer parking spaces than would have previously been required, saving an estimated $537 million in construction costs and freeing up 144 acres of land. 

Siegman estimates the costs of setting up an effective parking permit program could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000—a bargain compared to the cost of building parking, which can run as much as $50,000 per space. “There are all kinds of different feelings about what’s fair,” Siegman said, “but you can often come to a solution that has durable majority political support.” 

That’s what officials in Vancouver, British Columbia, did in 2017 to resolve crowded curbs in the West End. Despite 94 percent of residents having access to an off-street parking space, many still preferred to park on the street. Over 6,000 drivers had opted for the $6 a month permit for the chance to park in one of the 2,747 on-street spaces. When the city raised permit prices to $30 per month—more in line with what private garages charged—and installed more parking meters, curb congestion cleared up. Before that change, only one out of five blocks met the city’s standards of being less than 85 percent full at the busiest time of day. Within two years of the pricing adjustments, all of the blocks measured below that threshold, making it far easier to find a parking space. 

The Next Wave of Parking Reform 

More and more, champions of eliminating parking mandates are getting elected to offices and planning commissions, according to Jordan, of the Parking Reform Network. “One person can really get the idea and push it through,” he said. The growing number of cities that have taken this deregulatory action provides political cover for policy makers who have been hesitant to go first. 

But parking reform advocates say change should and will happen beyond the local level. Since “the perceived benefits of instituting parking regulations [have been] almost entirely local,” Siegman said, he thinks almost all of the productive reform to get rid of minimum parking laws is going to come from regional, state, or national governments. 

A wave of legislation against parking mandates has been gathering momentum on the West Coast. In 2020, Washington State quietly capped excessive parking requirements near transit for market-rate and affordable housing. California’s third attempt to limit local parking requirements near public transit succeeded in September with the signing of AB 2097. That came on the heels of another statewide rollback in Oregon, where a state land use commission struck down parking mandates for projects near transit, affordable housing, and small homes across the state’s eight largest metro regions, which house 60 percent of Oregon’s population.  

By July 2023, nearly 50 cities in Oregon will need to choose between wholly eliminating minimum parking requirements or implementing a suite of other tools to manage parking and comply with the new administrative rule. They are sure to have lots of company, as municipalities and states across the nation weigh the harm these regulations have caused against the 20th century dream of free and easy parking. 

Aaron Gill, of the Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission, has some simple advice for jurisdictions considering removing parking minimums: “I would say just do it. Don’t waste time having a discussion as to if it’s going to work or not. The reality is we have way too much parking in this country.” 

Catie Gould is a transportation researcher with the Seattle-based nonprofit think tank Sightline Institute. 

Lead image: Fordham Heights, New York. Credit: krblokhin via iStock/Getty Images Plus.