“Zoning cops have a knack for blocking affordable housing, but in Troy, New York, regulators greenlit an 11-unit apartment building on a vacant lot. Just as construction was about to kick off, however, the project ran up against a different, familiar hurdle.
Concerned neighbors—who already have housing—filed a lawsuit to keep outsiders out. Rather than challenge the developer directly, the project opponents instead took the city to court, insisting regulators hadn’t done enough research before granting a zoning change. The city won a trial court victory in 2023, but opponents appealed and scored a reversal on October 24, 2024.
What have the “concerned citizens” given as reason for legal action? Evidence of a nearby quarry allegedly used by Native Americans in the distant past. Strangely, proximity to this site was not an issue when these residents secured housing for themselves. The “high archaeological sensitivity,” as they frame it, came later.
New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) makes it easy for citizens to stall or kill housing in New York with almost any excuse they can cook up. Courts can be swayed by vague concepts like “community” or “neighborhood character.” Project opponents can even cite generic concerns without showing specific harm.
In Guilderland, New York, a citizen group raised alarms about global climate change when developers proposed five apartment buildings and a Costco. This group, represented by the same lawyer now working to derail housing in Troy, won at the trial court level. But an appellate court reversed the decision in 2022 noting that construction would result in less driving, not more, producing a net gain for air quality.
But these NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) activists don’t need a win in court to achieve their goals. Even when they lose, they can use SEQRA to freeze construction for months or longer. In Old Westbury, Long Island, developers waited 25 years for permission to build religious facilities. The legal labyrinth is also expensive. SEQRA litigation added $2 million to a single housing project in Hempstead, New York.”
“Imagine you’re a member of a religious minority that’s on the receiving end of a lot of hate, and the local zoning board is giving you a hard time over plans to expand your house of worship. Is it regulators being their nitpicky selves? Are the neighbors weaponizing rules to squeeze out the cars and foot traffic that accompany any successful endeavor? Or could it be hostility directed at your faith? Zoning has been used and abused in all these ways, which underlines the need for reform.”
“It takes San Francisco three years on average to fully approve new housing projects, the longest of any jurisdiction in California, according to an audit published by the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) in October.
The very predictable result is that the Golden State’s fourth-largest city is also one of the nation’s most expensive, with median one-bedroom rents above $2,000 and a median home value of $1.4 million.
That San Francisco is expensive because it takes forever to approve new housing isn’t a new finding. Whether the city will actually get rid of the regulations gumming up home construction is now coming to a head.”
“Caroline’s zoning supporters are typically either active or retired professionals. They live in the town and love it as much as anyone. But they also have no need to make a living there. It’s a position that lends itself to more restrictive notions of what should be allowed in Caroline: some homes, some businesses, some farms, and a lot of protected views and open space.
For them, a zoning code is a pretty straightforward way of protecting the things they like about Caroline while banning the things they think will spoil it. And if anti-zoners are worried about losing the ability to do something on their land, they should say as much, and come to the table to get protections included in the draft code.
Things aren’t so simple for Caroline’s anti-zoners. The necessity of making a living from their land means they have to be pretty open and adaptable to change. They often don’t know what the future will bring. It’s impossible for them to say how they might want to use their properties in the future.”
“The modest increase in housing production can be largely explained by how marginal many of these missing middle reforms have been.
Often, cities will legalize missing middle housing without allowing the new multi-unit buildings to be much larger than the single-family homes they’d replace. That means a builder faces all the costs of tearing down an old unit without the ability to add much additional revenue-generating floor space.”
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“Another problem facing missing middle home construction is a whole thicket of nonzoning rules and practices that assume new construction will either be single-family homes or larger apartment buildings.
“Zoning regulations control what kinds of buildings can be constructed where, and then what activity can happen inside them. They effectively socialize private property while controlling even the most mundane features of our physical environment and daily routines. Zoning rules flip property rights on their head, curtailing the owners’ ability to do what they wish on their land. In exchange, they sometimes give people near–veto power over what happens on their neighbors’ property.
Whether a disused shed stays cluttered with rusty lawn care equipment, is turned into a home business, or is converted into an in-law suite might not seem like a major decision. But the existence of a whole body of laws dedicated to controlling that decision tells you how far zoning reaches into American lives. The consequences of these laws are as far-reaching as they are devastating.”
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“The immediate costs of zoning are straightforward: By limiting new housing construction, zoning drives home prices up in—and drives people out of—the most in-demand neighborhoods. By micromanaging commercial activity, zoning prevents entrepreneurs from trying new things, making everyone poorer in the process.”
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“The conventional view of the Great Recession is that excess demand for housing—caused by some combination of loose monetary policy, government-subsidized credit, and unscrupulous lenders—inflated a bubble that inevitably had to pop. Leftists, liberals, libertarians, and conservatives can all find something to agree with in this theory.
But it’s wrong, according to Kevin Erdmann, a senior affiliated scholar at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. Erdmann has advanced a heterodox theory that this century’s most serious economic contraction before the pandemic can be traced back to zoning laws in the most in-demand cities.
In a 2020 paper on the origins of the recession, Erdmann and economist Scott Sumner argue that monetary policy was not exceptionally loose in the lead-up to the financial crisis and that new residential investment was not high by historic standards. Most of the toxic assets and bad mortgages originated after housing prices had already started to decline.
Erdmann and Sumner also point out that prices were increasing fastest in coastal “closed access” cities like New York and San Francisco, where the economy was booming but restrictive zoning regulations prevented much new housing from being built. The result was an out-migration of lower-income people to “contagion cities” in Nevada, Florida, Arizona, and other places where home building was less regulated. Erdmann and Sumner lay the housing crisis directly at the feet of NIMBYs—”not in my backyard” activists who opposed the construction of new housing.
“The NIMBY phenomenon that led to housing scarcity in closed-access cities induced households to migrate from large multi-unit buildings in dense coastal cities to single-family homes in cheaper cities,” write Erdmann and Sumner. “The primary source of demand was households looking to economize on housing consumption by moving out of the expensive coastal cities.”
Think of Mark and Patricia McCloskey as a class of activist. The McCloskeys of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City tried to protect their views, their property values, and their relatively low-traffic streets with zoning laws that banned apartments across whole swaths of the city. Lack of supply met huge demand, hiking prices in the process. Middle-class people were effectively priced out of urban apartments because those apartments were simply never built.
So instead of living in Los Angeles and New York City, middle- and lower-income people moved to Las Vegas and Phoenix. That influx of demand saw prices spike and builders respond by throwing up lots of new homes. The glut of new homes in inexpensive Sun Belt cities wasn’t just the result of an overinflated financial system. It was a response to real demand from cost-burdened coastal emigrants.
All this had massive macroeconomic consequences. Erdmann and Sumner argue the Great Recession was ultimately caused by federal officials misinterpreting rising home prices as a bubble rather than the result of a real shortage. So they tightened monetary and lending policy, and that tipped a rational building boom into an artificially induced recession.
It’s an out-of-the-box theory that deemphasizes or disputes many common libertarian diagnoses of the Great Recession that center on an overly profligate Federal Reserve or on reckless financial institutions banking on an inevitable federal bailout. But it does explain how the country was able to go from a supposed glut of housing oversupply to a shortage of somewhere between 4 million and 20 million homes. The glut was overinterpreted—and the shortage never went away.”
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“When NIMBY zoning rules cut off industries from innovation-breeding cities, the economy’s productivity as a whole suffers. Fewer inventions are created; fewer new ideas catch on. The higher wages and standards of living all that growth would have created do not materialize.
In “The Housing Theory of Everything,” a 2021 essay for Works in Progress, Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood cobble together the most recent research to estimate that zoning restrictions cost the average American somewhere between $8,800 and $16,000 a year in foregone income.”
“New York has some of the most restrictive local zoning regimes in the country, resulting in rock-bottom rates of housing construction and sky-high prices.
Now, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to fix this sad status quo by allowing developers to bypass city and town zoning codes altogether and get their housing projects approved directly by a fast-tracked state process.
“Through zoning, local communities hold enormous power to block growth,” said Hochul in her annual State of the State address yesterday. “People want to live here, but local decisions to limit growth mean they cannot. Local governments can and should make different choices.””
“Some people live together by choice. Others share space out of necessity. Lack of affordable housing forces many families to adjust, but the zoning police remain rigid in Cobb County, Georgia.
Even during a nationwide housing crisis, code enforcers northwest of Atlanta continue to enforce a narrow vision of suburbia. One rule limits overnight parking based on property size. Families can have one car for every 390 square feet of living space, which effectively prevents more than two vehicle owners from living together in a 1,000-square-foot unit.
Teen drivers are out of luck. So are adult children, college students, mothers-in-law, and any guest who stays longer than one week. The city does not concern itself with individual circumstances, nor does it care if vehicles remain in good condition with current tags. It counts newer models and clunkers the same.”
“Two Philadelphia-area churches have come under fire from local zoning officials, who say their free meal services, mental health counseling, and monthly pantries aren’t allowed on their properties and will have to stop or else they risk fines.
In early June, Pottstown staff sent letters to Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First, saying that this charitable work went beyond the allowable activities for churches in the borough’s Downtown zoning district.”
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“The two churches can either apply for a zoning variance—which requires going before the borough’s Zoning Hearing Board—or stop the disallowed charitable work. Failure to do either of those things could result in the churches being hit with $500 fines for every day they’re out of compliance.
“It was an absolute surprise when we got this letter,” says Dennis Coleman, the deacon of Christ Episcopal Church. He says that his church has been providing meals and an “essentials” pantry for years without incident.”
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“Even when charitable activities are allowed by the zoning code, the process for getting them approved is long and discretionary. Frequently, it will involve public hearings where opponents have the opportunity to urge zoning officials to deny permits for a new soup kitchen or shelter.”