Commonweal

Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth

Overview | Conversations with Advocates of Fair Growth | Living on the Fenceline

Introduction

Tug at any thread in a fabric and it affects the whole tapestry. So it is in society: if any element is seriously out of balance it can knock the whole system askew. This holds true for housing policy in the United States. Currently zoning decisions are left up to local officials despite the fact that ultimately the fifty states have the legal jurisdiction over the regulation of land use.

State legislators have been wary, however, of intervening in local land use issues. The justification for local control of zoning sounds reasonable: it permits residents a chance to vote for the officials who will decide what is built in their neighborhoods. This appears to make sense because it is the local residents who are most heavily affected by what is built down the street from them. There are, however, serious problems with this devolution of zoning power from the states to town, city, and county zoning boards.

While the subject may sound arcane, zoning decisions have a huge impact on the way society works and on who carries societal burdens and who reaps the rewards. Zoning decisions are the DNA of development and they determine where different kinds of housing is built, where people of different incomes live, and where locally unwanted land uses such as highly polluting industries or waste dumps are located.

The vesting of zoning decision-making power in the hands of local officials has permitted jurisdictions to create their own fiscal fiefdoms where the can build a moat that keeps out the poor. To this end, middle class and affluent suburbs around the country have passed exclusionary zoning code provisions that prohibit the construction of multi-family housing. This may sound innocuous but if a jurisdiction does not allow the construction of apartment buildings, then it ensures that there will be no affordable units available for low-income Americans. In some areas whole counties have outlawed the construction of multi-family housing. Other exclusionary techniques include requiring large lot or house sizes to ensure that no affordable housing is built.

These exclusionary zoning techniques have a number of advantages. First, by creating zoning rules that only permit the construction of expensive houses, they insure that their jurisdiction will have a wealthy population and a healthy tax base. Second, by excluding poor residents suburban officials avoid paying for the social services this population needs. In this fashion, local officials can keep their coffers filled and their residents happy. As a result, they are frequently re-elected.

Exclusionary zoning practices are now deeply entrenched around the country. They are popular because they give residents control over who is permitted to move in next door. This is important to many of those who fled from the cities in the great white flight exodus that stripped the cities of much of their tax base. Many people have seen urban and inner-ring suburbs transformed from thriving communities into high-poverty, high-crime areas where property values plummeted. Having reached the suburbs these people are determined not to let that happen in their community. They worked hard for their money and much of it is tied up in their homes. The best way they know to protect the equity in their homes and the quality of life in their community is through iron-clad exclusionary zoning regulations. That is why politicians are loath to suggest reforms of zoning practices. Fighting exclusionary zoning is seen as the third rail of politics: smart legislators just dont step on it.

But the costs of exclusionary zoning, economically and racially segregated residential areas, and the balkanized system of development it spawns are heavy. Today, looking across America, we can see many impoverished cities and towns that are surrounded by affluent suburbs. This unfair development pattern makes it hard for people who need jobs in the inner city to get to the fast-growing, outer suburban areas where jobs are being generated. This spatial mismatch keeps many urban low-income residents unemployed.

To further exacerbate the problem, many affluent suburbs ensure that mass transit systems are not funded that would allow low-income urban residents to reach the suburbs easily. In Atlanta, for example, MARTA, the urban mass transit system, stops at some of the affluent county lines. And the buses are scheduled to take commuters into the city in the morning and pick them up at night, not facilitate the transportation of urban workers seeking jobs in the suburbs. This means that in many areas if you want to get to a job in the suburbs you have to drive and that requires spending hard-earned, low-wage income on supporting a car. The problem with this configuration of the transportation system is that those working poor who do manage the reverse commute to the suburbs contribute to traffic congestion and must spend long hours commuting. This gives them less time to spend with their families and less time to supervise their children.

The mismatch between where the jobs are being generated and where the workers can find affordable homes is a problem that will not be solved until the states begin to put pressure on local communities to practice a more inclusionary type of zoning that permits the construction of more affordable housing. One form this pressure might take is through the priority list that state officials make for infrastructure spending. When state officials decide where state funds should be spent building new schools, extending sewer lines, or improving the roads, they could decide to give a higher priority to communities that practice inclusionary zoning (a social good) compared with those communities that enact exclusionary zoning regulations (a social bad).

Providing incentives for inclusionary zoning makes sense from a societal perspective because the fundamental problem with exclusionary zoning is that it results in residential developments that are segregated by income and race. Inclusionary zoning, by contrast, holds out the promise of permitting the creation of more diverse communities that are healthier and more sustainable. The challenge, then, is to change the development rules to permit a wide variety of housing types to be built so that our communities can be more economically and racially diverse.

This will not only improve the quality of life for low-income people who will be able to find affordable homes in good neighborhoods with good jobs, good schools, and safe streets; it will also benefit the affluent. Under the current exclusionary zoning system, life in the affluent suburbs looks good on the outside but the cracks in the system are beginning to appear. Many of these communities are plagued by traffic congestion, which is high on the list of suburban complaints. The system also fails to permit aging in place. As people get older in these affluent communities they find they cannot downsize their living accommodations and find a smaller, cheaper condo or apartment in which to live that requires less maintenance. To find less expensive housing they have to leave the community they have grown to love. Residents of exclusionary suburbs also discover that when their children graduate from college they cannot find affordable rental housing close to their parents and as a result young people cannot afford to move back into the communities where they grew up. Similarly, many residents of affluent suburbs are chagrined to learn that once their children graduate from college the only housing they can afford is in a distant community where affordable housing is available. This means that grandparents have to travel long distances to see their children and grandchildren and see them less frequently than they would if there were more housing options in their neighborhood.

A further problem with exclusionary suburbs is that many people who work in these communities cannot afford to live in them. The teachers who teach in affluent suburban schools must commute to work. The policemen who walk the beat must live in a community where housing costs are more affordable. The nurse in the local hospital must also drive for hours to get to and from work. The irony, here, is that while the residents of exclusionary suburbs trust these workers to teach their children, nurse them, and provide fire and law enforcement services, they dont trust them to live in the same neighborhood when night falls. The illogic of this is staggering.

The solution to the problem posed to society by exclusionary zoning is straightforward. The state needs to intervene in the land use decision making process to ensure that all communities provide a wide spectrum of types of housing to meet the needs of the entire community. Inclusionary zoning ordinances are on the books in a number of states, counties, cities, and towns around the country. True, it is still early days for inclusionary zoning but experiments are beginning to bear fruit. And once in place, residents find that requiring that new developments include some affordable housing does not create enormous social problems or bring down property values.

Affordable Housing: A Good Social Investment

In addition to pushing for inclusionary zoning, it would also make sense for society to invest in more affordable housing in economically distressed communities. Affordable housing has gone through an enormous transformation in the last couple of decades. The new generation of affordable housing now being built in many parts of the country is indistinguishable from market-rate housing. As a result, when well designed and constructed affordable housing is built in low-income neighborhoods it helps bring up property values and creates incentives for businesses to move in, for market-rate units to be built in the same area, and for local land-owners to fix up their properties.

Unfortunately, voters have yet to understand that investing more tax dollars in affordable housing provides excellent returns that can stabilize poor communities and add to the tax base. When people have a clean, safe, affordable place to live they have a better chance to educate themselves and find work. This in turn reduces their need for a variety of social services that are expensive for society to support. Put succinctly, it is more efficient for society to invest in affordable housing than it is for the taxpayer to pay for additional law enforcement and the construction of more prisons.

Today, politicians (and voters) are willing to invest tax dollars in education, health care, police and fire services, highways, sewers, food stamps, and a wide variety of other public services. But public funding for housing is being cut. This does not make sense. The fact that we give homeowners a $90 billion a year mortgage interest deduction while under-funding affordable housing just demonstrates that the affluent are willing to vote themselves subsidies but not share them fairly with the working poor.

What Is To Be Done?

What should be done? There is a clear need to educate Americans about the problem posed by exclusionary zoning and the promise of inclusionary zoning that promotes the construction of mixed-income communities. I hope my book, Fair Growth: Building Mixed-Income Communities, will contribute to this field. In it I report about what some of the most innovative practitioners of equitable development are doing. But to move the campaign for the creation of mixed-income communities forward it makes sense to begin to organize those who have an interest in dismantling exclusionary zoning practices where possible and enacting inclusionary zoning ordinances. This coalition would include but not be limited to environmental justice advocates, civil rights groups, labor unions, environmentalists, social justice activists, faith-based groups, affordable housing providers, community development organizers, and business groups concerned about workforce availability. It would also look for opportunities to bring together political coalitions between inner-city, inner-ring suburb, and exurban residents who see that their quality of life will improve if land use decisions are not only smart but also fair. Members of this coalition would have three goals:

First, they would educate the public about the costs of exclusionary zoning and the benefits of inclusionary regulations.

Second, they would challenge in court some of the exclusionary zoning practices that have a discriminatory impact on low-income and minority Americans. For example, a suit could be brought against counties, cities, and towns that forbid the construction of multi-family housing.

Third, they would lobby for more funding for affordable housing.

For the past two years I have been traveling around the country on a Ford grant doing interviews with a wide spectrum of experts who are dealing with how development decisions impact low-income Americans. Some of these people work on policy aspects of how to make development more equitable. Others are involved in designing and building affordable or mixed income housing. All of them have in common a determination to see that the DNA of development is changed in a way that promotes a smarter, fairer pattern of development that permits the creation of mixed-income communities. Individually, these practitioners of fair growth face enormous obstacles; together they could form a powerful coalition to promote equitable development.

To date I have done interviewed the following people who might contribute their considerable expertise to this coalition:

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