Tag Archives: inclusionary zoning

Nonprofit – For-profit Alliances Can Work In Fair Housing Advocacy as Well as Housing Development

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Working in a non-profit organization, and often working most directly on public policy and advocacy issues with people in other non-profit or governmental entities, I can easily lose sight of some aspects of the universe of for-profit businesses. I recently started thinking more about how much overlap and shared common interests that my work as an advocate for affordable and inclusive housing has with at least some private for-profit housing developers.  We both are often striving for zoning by-laws that permit a higher density of homes, narrower setback requirements, more flexible parking requirements and simpler-more predictable permitting processes among a myriad of other related things.

My primary aim is to create more homes at rental and sale prices that are more affordable to more people in a state with very high housing costs and housing shortages in many places. I know that a more or less planned increasing supply of homes especially in combination with various public subsidies can generate at least some housing that is affordable to people on the lower ends of the income scale. I also know that because of the fact that more people in certain fair housing protected classes tend to have lower incomes and that developing more affordable and accessible homes will increase housing opportunities for people in protected classes. The flip side is that shortages of housing supply, overdevelopment of high end housing on large lot sizes, and long uncertain and unnecessarily daunting and expensive permitting processes will tend to increase the price of homes and that tends to disparately exclude— whether purposely or not—  people in protected classes such as many minorities, people with disabilities, and others. My goal is creating more inclusive and less expensive homes and communities, and not creating more exclusive and more expensive homes and communities.

Achieving more of the goals of inclusivity will create conditions that are beneficial to large sectors of our towns and cities—including businesses that need more workers, more shoppers and more consumers of services. Governmental entities will be in better shape also with a broader tax base to help maintain needed services.

To get to a state of increased inclusion and affordability will require some willingness to change some bylaws that have been around for a long time and if they ever had a good purpose do not do so now in our current society and economy. It is in the work of achieving some of these changes that I have come to realize that advocates of fair, affordable and safe homes have good opportunities to collaborate with private developers.

To this end our Fair Housing Project has pulled together some private developers, currently mostly in the Chittenden County, Vermont area, to join forces with us to work on some of those things we agree on and to perhaps mitigate some of the areas of disagreement that we will no doubt have.

Getting stuck in our own limited world view does not help us make real progress in our communities. We can break out of that mode.

Borrowed from “SHELTERFORCE” -10 Ways to Talk About Inclusionary Housing, Differently

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Shelterforce blog by Sasha Hauswald – September 20, 2017

…  Number 4 is one of my favorite. (Thriving Communities Editor)

” 4.  Streamline barriers to development

Many jurisdictions have zoning code requirements that are so complex that it is nearly impossible to build anything without lengthy and unpredictable approval processes for special exceptions to the zoning code. Inclusionary done right can greatly reduce procedural barriers to new development.

Affordable housing requirements are often adopted in combination with area-wide up-zoning or enhanced flexibility to build, by right, a reasonably profitable multifamily building. In these cases, inclusionary housing programs can actually increase development activity. Most importantly, inclusionary housing policies establish clear and predictable expectations that local developers can plan around. “

Reform land use, promote shared growth of new housing

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– San Francisco Chronicle  http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Reform-land-use-promote-shared-growth-of-new-9283703.php

By Jason Furman | September 25, 2016 | Updated: September 25, 2016 8:34pm

housing-constructionpicturePhoto: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

When certain government policies — like minimum lot sizes, off-street parking requirements, height limits, prohibitions on multifamily housing, or unnecessarily lengthy permitting processes — restrict the supply of housing, fewer units are available and the price rises.

It is no secret that cities like San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., face challenges in the availability and cost of housing. But policymakers and economists have increasingly recognized both the role that certain inappropriate land use restrictions play in raising housing costs — not just in major cities but across the country — and the opportunity for modernizing these regulations to promote shared growth.

Basic economic theory predicts that when the supply of a good is constrained, its price rises and the quantity available falls. In this respect, the market for housing is no different: When certain government policies — like minimum lot sizes, off-street parking requirements, height limits, prohibitions on multifamily housing, or unnecessarily lengthy permitting processes — restrict the supply of housing, fewer units are available and the price rises. On the other hand, more efficient policies can promote availability and affordability of housing, regional economic development, transportation options and socioeconomic diversity.

Research suggests that local barriers have become more restrictive in recent decades. One way to measure this is comparing the sale price of houses with construction costs. This gap typically reflects the cost of buying land — which increases with tighter land use restrictions. Indeed, the gap has increased in the past two decades: House prices from 2010 to 2013 were 56 percent higher than construction costs, a 23 percentage-point crease over the average gap during the 1990s.

Of course, many land use regulations can have benefits for communities. Environmental reasons in some localities may make it appropriate to limit high-density or multiuse development. Similarly, health and safety concerns — such as an area’s air traffic patterns, viability of its water supply, or its geologic stability — may merit height and lot size restrictions.

But in other cases, barriers to housing development can allow a small number of individuals to enjoy the benefits of living in a community while excluding many others, limiting diversity and economic mobility.

This upward pressure on house prices may also undermine the market forces that typically determine patterns of housing construction, leading to mismatches between household needs and available housing.

Improving land use policies can also create benefits for the U.S. economy as a whole. High- productivity cities offer higher-income jobs than low-productivity cities and often attract workers who move from other cities, naturally bringing more resources to productive areas of the country. But when unnecessary barriers restrict the supply of housing and costs increase, then workers — particularly lower-income workers who would benefit the most — are less able to move.

All told, this means slower economic growth: Some researchers have estimated that GDP could have been almost 10 percent higher in 2009 if workers and capital freely moved so that the distribution of wages across cities was the same as in 1964.

On the other hand, smarter land use and housing policy can promote both growth and equity. While most land use policies are appropriately made at the state and local level, the federal government can also play a role in encouraging smart land use regulations. Today, the Obama administration is releasing a new toolkit at http://bit.ly/2d4dVAc that highlights best practices that localities have employed — including streamlining permitting processes, eliminating off-street parking requirements, reducing minimum lot sizes, and enacting high-density and multifamily zoning policies — to reduce overly burdensome land use restrictions and promote mobility and economic growth.

Reforming land use policies can have important benefits for local residents and the nation as a whole, not only raising economic growth, but ensuring that its benefits are widely shared among all Americans.

Jason Furman is the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

New HUD AFFH rule – the Good & Some Devils in Details

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Okay dear readers, this is a wonky article but for those of you interested in HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule it is a good read. (Ted Wimpey)

The Devils in the Details: Key Issues in Implementing the New AFFH Rule

 by Dan Immergluck and Mindy Kao Rooflines post on July 5, 2016

“For most of the Fair Housing Act’s history, its requirement to “Affirmatively Further Fair Housing” has been largely dormant. With the advent of the new AFFH rules in July 2015, however, there is some promise that this provision might be taken more seriously.”

http://tinyurl.com/AFFH-rule-FHA-DetailDevils  Link to ROOFLINES, the Shelterforce Blog,

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Landmark Discrimination Case: Fair Housing Act Thwarts NIMBYs

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I am sharing here in full an article about a U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision with significant fair housing and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing import for planning, zoning and permitting of residential housing development that was published April 28, 2016  in the legal issue blog site, “Manatt.” Especially check out the three basic “Practice Pointers” at the end of the article for the main take away.

— https://www.manatt.com/real-estate-and-land-use/Landmark-Discrimination-Case-Fair-Housing-Act-Thwarts.aspx —-

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Real Estate and Land Use

Apr 28, 2016
Landmark Discrimination Case: Fair Housing Act Thwarts NIMBYs

Avenue 6E Investments, LLC v. City of Yuma (March 25, 2016)

Author: Michael M. Berger

Why It Matters: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a decision in favor of the City of Yuma, Arizona, and concluded instead that there was sufficient evidence to present to a jury that the City had rejected the developer’s application for an increase in zoning density for reasons of barely disguised animus toward the expected residents of the new development. The Court held that issues of disparate treatment and disparate impact under both the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the federal Fair Housing Act needed to be tried.

Facts: The plaintiffs/developers acquired 42 acres of undeveloped land with the intent of building a “moderately priced” housing project. They are known in the area as a developer of Hispanic neighborhoods. Although the General Plan allowed for homes on either 6,000- or 8,000-square-foot lots, a prior owner had it zoned for 8,000-square-foot lots. Unfortunately, the economy would no longer support lots of that size and the developers sought a rezoning to the smaller size which in turn would allow increased density. The City had done some studies, concluding that its population was racially divided, with most of the low-to-moderate-income housing in the areas populated by Hispanics. These developers wanted to develop their housing on the border of a predominantly white area.

The City’s General Plan acknowledged that racial segregation is wrong and that large-lot zoning raises housing costs and impairs the ability of the City to provide housing for moderate-income buyers. The Planning Commission approved the rezoning to smaller lots and recommended that the City Council do so as well. The City Council, however, was besieged with NIMBY complaints and thinly veiled anti-Hispanic charges, complaining that these particular developers were known to “cater to” the people responsible for the vast majority of major crimes.

Two other facts had some import. First, there were similarly priced and modelled homes available elsewhere in Yuma, a fact that the City thought absolved it of any claims of disparate impact. Second, a fact that proved difficult for the City to impress on the Court was that, in the preceding three years, this was the only rezoning request that had been rejected out of 76 applications.

The developers filed suit under the federal Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, for violation of the Equal Protection guarantee, as well as for disparate impact and treatment under the Fair Housing Act. The trial court entered summary judgment for the City on the sole ground that the adequate supply of similar housing elsewhere in the City automatically foreclosed any finding of disparate impact.

The Decision: The Court of Appeals reversed. When the opinion began with a paean to the Fair Housing Act and the way it “strikes at the heart of the persistent racism that so deeply troubles our Nation,” something that the provision of more affordable housing can help to cure, it was apparent that the conclusion was foregone: judgment reversed.

The Court of Appeals was unable to disregard the bright light of the fact that out of 76 applications, the only time the City had denied a zone change in the past three years was this one. There could be no explanation for the denial other than racism, particularly in light of some of the communications made by neighbors to the City Council about the presumed criminal proclivities of the anticipated residents of the new development. Nor would the Court have anything to do with the trial court’s idea that the presence of similar developments elsewhere in Yuma obviated the problem. Indeed, it merely emphasized the fact that the City was racially divided and at least some of its residents wanted things to remain that way.

There appeared to be no principled opposition to the requested zone change. As the Court of Appeals put it, the record was replete with “code words” and “veiled references” for the Hispanic influx that the neighbors anticipated, turning the development into a “low-cost, high-crime neighborhood.” The case had no chance on appeal.

Practice Pointers:

  • Neighbors frequently oppose projects in their neighborhoods that are intended to be occupied by lower-income families. Local governments often bow to this political pressure. This decision may well serve to justify these projects, even in the face of neighbor opposition.
  • Language similar to the “code words” used by neighbors in this case is common among project opponents opposing higher-density projects. Local agencies need to be mindful of the exposure that this kind of language may impose if the projects are disapproved by the local agency.
  • At the very least, local agencies need to include sufficient data and facts in the record to support their decision as not being based on discriminatory rhetoric.

Daunting affordability gaps

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Here’s a seat-of-the-pants calculation that shows one dimension of Burlington’s (and Vermont’s) affordability problem for renters:

According to Vermont Housing Data, Burlington has 9,596 rental units. Of the households living in them, 61 percent are paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing — the standard threshold of unaffordability. By that standard, 5,853 rental units in Burlington are unaffordable to the people who live in them.

Lake Champlain Burlington, Vermont.

(The same source reports Vermont’s rental units at 69,581. More than half the households in those units – 52.5 percent – are paying more than 30 percent. That puts the state’s unaffordable rental units at 36,530.)

Those are just the figures for the standard housing burden. In Burlington, 35.7 percent of renters are severely burdened, paying more than 50 percent of their income on housing. That works out to 3,426 rental units that, for them, are severely unaffordable (and 18,369 such units statewide).

These are unsettling numbers, and of course there’s no easy remedy or policy panacea (although doubling public funding for affordable housing and raising the minimum wage to $15 would probably help).

Inclusionary zoning – which requires a specified percentage of units in new developments to be affordable – is among the policies that can be brought to bear. For a thorough, thoughtful treatment of the subject by Rick Jacobus, a Burlington alum, click here. He points out, among other things, that “inclusionary housing is one of the few proven strategies for locating affordable housing in asset-rich neighborhoods where residents are likely to benefit from access to quality schools, public services and better jobs.” In other words, it’s fully in keeping with the renewed national emphasis on affirmatively furthering fair housing.

He also writes that “inclusionary housing has yet to reach its full potential.” That’s an understatement in Vermont — one of 13 states that has statutes authorizing inclusionary policies that virtually no municipality except Burlington has taken advantage of – and in Burlington itself, where an inclusionary ordinance has been on the books for 25 years. Over that period, the policy has resulted in only about 260 affordable units (many of them condos).

That relatively low number reflects, in part, a lag in Burlington housing development in comparison to the rest of the county. What accounts for that, and is there any way the city’s inclusionary policy could be tweaked to make it more effective? Answers to these and other questions may be a year away. The Housing Action Plan calls for hiring a consultant to review the city’s inclusionary policy and make recommendations by next fall.

More housing-crisis dispatches

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Another of our occasional samplers on the unaffordability epidemic:

  • As Seattle wrestles with housing unaffordability, an op-ed in the local paper recommends looking to Berlin!

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Germany’s largest city, newly flooded by young people and immigrants, has a population of 85 percent renters and has introduced a new form of rent control — the “rental price brake,” which seeks to rein in rent increases. (Median rents have gone up 50 percent in six years, by one account.) And government has imposed other constraints – on renovations (can’t be too fancy without approval) and on conversion to vacation homes. Well, that may sound promising, but to what effect? Protesters are in the streets, we learn in the Wall Street Journal, as “Berlin’s Housing Problems Boil Over.”

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  • In Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, 96 percent of the housing stock is unaffordable to a family of four earning $43,000 annually. So, the City Council is considering a form of inclusionary zoning with a buy-out provision. New developments would have to include 10 percent affordable units, or that requirement could be waived if the developer pays $220,000 per unit into a city fund to support affordable housing. Now, that’s not a new idea, but the buy-out figure looks rather high (Burlington’s is $100,000 per unit), and of course, there’s the concern that any new housing developed by the city not lump all the lower-income people together in their own blighted enclave.
  • In Columbus, Ohio’s Franklin County, more than 24,000 people applied for Section 8 vouchers from an agency that is prepared to give out … 200, followed by 70 a month. That’s in a county where 13,000 vouchers are in use.
  • In Miami, old people camped out overnight just so they could file applications to live in an affordable senior housing complex.
  • In Portland, Ore., the newly declared “housing emergency” is expected to last at least a year.
  • And in Palo Alto – we know, we know, this is Silicon Valley and expected to be unaffordable beyond  imagining – a local man and college graduate who earns a “decent salary” is living with his parents because he can’t afford an apartment. He graduated from Palo Alto High 20 years ago, so he’s too old to be a Millennial! Here’s what he told the City Council about himself and his cohorts:

“All of us went to great colleges, great grad schools, and not one of us can live in the city.”

 

Familiar struggles to the south

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 Fresh off yesterday’s post on single-family zoning comes this news out of Louisville: a proposal to allow developers to build multi-family housing in single-family zoned districts. Developers would also get to build denser projects if a percentage of the units are affordable – a variant of inclusionary zoning.

louisville

But alas, density bonuses aren’t enough, as this editorial out of Charlotte, N.C., makes clear. They resulted in zero affordable units from private developers in that city over the last couple of years, so other planning tools are needed to meet the massive affordable housing gap in that city.

Ostensibly these big cities to the south have little in common with any place in Vermont, but it’s worth noting that they’re both struggling with the same overall problem we face here – an acute affordable housing shortage – and that there are no silver bullets. It’s a complexity that requires a mix of policies to alleviate.

 

There but for the grace of God go we

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A report is out from The Century Foundation that exposes interesting national demographic trends that appear, on their face, to have little to do with Vermont. We’re not so sure, though.

“The Architecture of Segregation,” by Paul Jargowsky, argues that the number of high-poverty neighborhoods nationally has increased significantly since 2000 and that poverty has become more concentrated – in part because of policy choices that could be changed to produce a different result. As is typical with national-scale reports like this, the focus is on major metropolitan areas, such as Detroit or St. Louis, so the Vermont reader is left wondering what any of this has to do with us – even if we do want to understand sociological trends around the country that help explain events in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. (Note of regional interest: the metro area with both the highest black concentration of poverty and the highest Hispanic concentration of poverty is a little more than a stone’s throw away: Syracuse, N.Y.)

Well, Vermont may not have poverty concentrations in the scale of the metro areas, but it’s still worth considering whether similar trends feeding disparate residential patterns have been at work here. For example, many suburbs have grown at the expense of cities they surround. Jargowosky’s word for that grown is “cannibalistic.”

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“In virtually all metropolitan areas, suburban rings grew much faster than was needed to accommodate metropolitan population growth,” he writes. That has a ring of familiarity around here. Burlington’s population has been fairly stagnant; the big housing growth is indeed in the suburbs. But to what extent does the new housing reflect the income distribution in the population? What share of the new rental complexes rising from the fields in Williston, for example, are “affordable”?

Jargowskyomes to two conclusions that could have some application here, or at least are worth thinking about:

“Our highly dispersed and profoundly unequal distribution of housing is not inevitable; indeed, it is not the norm around the world. The two main changes that need to occur are simple to state, but hard to bring about. First, the federal and state governments must begin to control suburban development so that it is not cannibalistic: new housing construction must be roughly in line with metropolitan population growth.”

Exactly how state government here (in the absence of county government) would attempt to assert such “control” is an open question.

“Second, every city and town in a metropolitan area should be required to ensure that the new housing built reflects the income distribution of the metropolitan area as a whole. To some, this suggestion may seem like a massive intervention in the housing market.  In fact, exclusionary zoning is already a massive intervention in the housing market that impedes a more equitable distribution of affordable housing.”

This brings us back to beating the drum for inclusionary zoning, which is sadly missing throughout the state, including the booming suburbs of Chittenden County.

 

Brief respite from drought/wildfire news

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An interesting story in the UC-Berkeley student newspaper touches on several themes of interest. Yes, it’s alien territory – high-rent California, urban beyond our rustic imagination (Alameda County alone, home to Berkeley and Oakland, has 2 ½ times the population of the entire state of Vermont).

Still, there’s resonant material here:

  • A university food-service worker who can’t afford to live in the town where she works, Berkeley, and who thus must endure a long commute. She pays a mere $1,400 for a 2BR apartment in Richmond (hey, at $700 a bedroom, that’s about the going rate in Burlington!). Berkeley’s 2BR apartments average about $2,100.   Here’s a shot of a Berkeley “castle.” Not so exotic, really — we can picture a building like this in St. Johnsbury or Rutland.

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Chances are, a UC food-service worker makes a good deal more than a UVM food service worker. After all, the University of California recently raised its minimum wage to $15, more than Sodexo pays its line workers in Burlington, and the main beneficiaries were reported to be student employees, apparently because the regulars were already getting at least that much.

So, yes, the numbers are all inflated compared to our world, but the cast of characters is similar: workers who can’t find affordable housing near where they’re employed or where their kids go to school.

  • Berkeley has had some form of inclusionary zoning for nearly 20 years, but it hasn’t done the trick. In fact, the affordable housing shortage has increased. This doesn’t mean inclusionary zoning is worthless. It’s an important policy tool, but it’s not salvation and in many cases produces only a small fraction of the affordable units needed. (Burlington’s total is less than 250 units over 25 years, fewer than 100 of which were rentals).

Here’s another, not-so-picturesque perspective of pricey Berkeley:

berkeley2

  • Simply building more housing isn’t going to solve the affordability problem. So says a housing activist quoted in the stories. Yes, he’s talking about the Bay area, which apparently is pretty well-built out within its topographic limitations. Building new housing there typically means tearing down an existing building and replacing it with something taller and more costly.

We hesitate to draw the same conclusion about Burlington, which likewise is pretty well built out, but which still has plenty of room for in-fill and accessory units. Here, a surfeit of additional rental units might indeed alleviate the upward pressure on rents, but not enough, we suspect, for low-wage workers at our state university.