If ignorance is bliss, then willful ignorance must surely be heavenly.
Governing, the on-line news service devoted to local policy making coverage, recently reported that in a survey of city mayors regarding homelessness and affordable housing issues “close to 7 in 10 had the view that zoning was a barrier of little or no consequence, despite the impact of zoning codes on housing development.”
“It’s important to recognize that one of the basic reasons people don’t have housing is because the housing is not being built in the first place,” architect and attorney Sara Bronin told Governing. “A big reason for that is these misunderstood, often overlooked local zoning codes that have profound impacts on everything we do.”
I suspect that most mayors know very well that zoning, particularly exclusionary zoning, is indeed a key factor in the dearth of affordable housing. But they also know that single family zoning is the third-rail of local politics: Touch it and you die.
How else to explain the GNV City Commission’s otherwise baffling rejection of Commissioner Bryan Eastman’s request to study the idea of easing zoning restrictions in order to allow the construction of smaller i.e. “starter family” homes in most neighborhoods.
Understand, Eastman wasn’t asking the commission to authorize smaller home construction. He was simply requesting that the City Planning Commission be directed to review the issue.
As a matter of simple collegial courtesy toward a newly elected commissioner, that request should have been a slam dunk.
But apparently, three commissioners and the Mayor deemed even that a swerve too close toward the electrifying third rail.
“If this had been before us last year when the conversation first came to us, this would be the law right now,” Mayor Harvey Ward said in rejecting Eastman’s request.
What? Is there is a time stamp on innovation at City Hall?
“My ask was small,” Eastman later posted on Facebook, “simply have the Plan Board come back to us with it as one option, and you can vote against it then if you’d like. That was rejected by the Commission.”
Eastman’s frustration is understandable. He has pointed out that his own modest home is now illegal to build “in 96.2 percent of the City….It’s a typical starter home, the kind that built the American middle class and are common across WW2 era neighborhoods like mine.”
But a funny thing happened after World War II. With the dawning of the era of integration, cities began to roll out exclusionary zoning laws in order to keep neighborhoods segregated by economic status…which more often than not amounted to de facto racial segregation as well.
It is no surprise that the very first official act of this new commission – indeed, it happened immediately after the formal swearing-in ceremony – was to jump start the process of rolling back the most forward-thinking accomplishment of the old commission: Liberating GNV housing market from the segregation-era restrictions of single family zoning.
Three commissioners, Cynthia Chestnut, Desmon Duncan-Walker and Ed Book are content to keep GNV frozen in amber. Three others, Eastman, Casey Willits and Rena Saco are urbanist thinkers who want to see GNV make the leap from cozy college town to vibrant university city.
And Mayor Ward promised again and again and again that, if elected, he would vote to leap GNV back to its pre-election status quo.
If only Eastman’s had been on the commission last year.
And make no mistake, size matters very much when it comes to opening up affordable housing stock.
Fastcompany.com recently reported what’s happened in Houston since the city, in 1998, relaxed its 5,000 square foot minimum lot size requirement and allowed lots as small as 1,400 square feet.
“Between 2005 and 2018, the (city’s) Inner Loop saw 75,000 new housing units completed, nearly half of them were townhouse units,” Fastcompany reported. “That’s more housing than San Francisco and Oakland produced, combined, over the same period. The Inner Loop…comprises 5% of the total land area of Harris County, but accounted for 19% of new housing built between 2005 and 2018.”
“Houston’s zoning policy is no panacea, and it’s not worth copying whole hog. But at least on the housing front, Houston’s lack of zoning appears to be a significant factor behind its relative affordability. Abundant housing and low market-rate rents make it much easier to combat homelessness, turning Houston into a national model on this issue.”
Which is not to say that GNV-in-amber has no homeless affordable housing policy. City Hall’s strategy is to cobble together clumps of federal, state and local subsidy dollars so as to at least move the needle a bit on housing affordability. When the free market’s hands are tied, taxpayer-funded solutions are all that remain.
The problem with relaxing exclusionary zoning is that, in the short term, it is perceived as a high risk, low reward proposition by officials who have a difficult time seeing beyond their next election cycle.
As Katherine Levine Einstein, co-principal investigator of the aforementioned survey of mayors, told Governing, easing exclusionary zoning can’t change a city’s affordable housing picture overnight.
“But it could make a profound difference if we think about the trajectories of cities over 10 and 20 years,” she added.
Gee, if only we had 10 or 20 year terms for commissioners and mayors.
FreeGNV 