David Zalubowski/AP Photo
Cities and states are starting to consider the social ramifications of single-family zoning laws.
Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing
By Diana Lind
Bold Type Books
Americans are beginning to rethink the single-family home as the exclusive basis of the American dream. In 2017, when a young politician named Jacob Frey became mayor of Minneapolis, 70 percent of the city was zoned for single-family homes. But Frey and a group of progressive activists pushed for dramatic change: the legalization of duplexes and triplexes citywide to make housing more affordable. Environmentalists pointed out that single-family zoning contributed to climate change. Supporters of racial justice demonstrated how single-family zoning perpetuates racial segregation. Labor unions argued that artificially constraining the supply of housing was driving up prices and hurting workers. That coalition made a difference: A year after Frey’s election, Minneapolis ended its policy of single-family zoning. The state of Oregon banned single-family zoning in most cities in 2019, and Washington and Nebraska have been considering similar reforms.
For the moment, the COVID-19 pandemic may have strengthened preferences for single-family homes since people are worried about contact and contagion and keeping their distance from others. The press has featured articles about affluent residents of New York and other cities who have fled to leafy suburbs and pushed up housing prices there. So this might seem like an awkward time to talk about the limitations of single-family homes, much less to publish a manifesto against them, as Diana Lind has done in her new book, Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing. But Lind, a writer and urban policy specialist, pushes back on the media narrative. She points out that poverty is a much bigger predictor than density of virus spread and argues that living in a single-family home may be bad for one’s health. Doing so can promote loneliness, boredom, and economic stress for families, she says, to say nothing of larger societal ills such as environmental degradation.
More from Richard D. Kahlenberg
The economic argument for alternatives to the single-family home has a particular appeal to millennials, who are less economically secure than their parents or grandparents were when they were the same ages. Millennials also say they feel lonely more often than other generations, so many are seeking housing that allows them both to meet interesting people through “co-living” and to save money by sharing a kitchen and living room. Lind also describes the proliferation of “tiny homes,” those less than 400 square feet, which can be located in communities with other tiny homes or as “accessory dwelling units,” such as backyard cottages adjacent to larger single-family homes. These housing units are more affordable, have smaller carbon footprints than larger homes, and can foster cross-generational relationships, Lind says.
Just as the arguments of vegetarians—however cogent in theory—leave many Americans unconvinced, Lind’s case against single-family homes as a personal lifestyle choice may not persuade the majority of readers. But she stands on much stronger grounds when, like Jacob Frey in Minneapolis, she goes after government policies that flatly forbid individuals from building anything but a single-family home on their plot of land. Such “exclusionary zoning” policies ban the construction of backyard cottages, duplexes, or triplexes as well as low-rise apartment buildings. Some zoning laws go further and command that even single-family homes cannot be built unless they have a minimum number of square feet and sit on a lot of a minimum size. Other zoning edicts dictate that the exterior of homes be made of a certain (often expensive) material. “Government gatekeepers,” Lind notes, “dictate which buildings can be built and how they should look.” Still other laws regulate how many nonfamily members can live with one another.
Why, in a country that prizes personal liberty, does government have such an outsized role in all these decisions? Part of the problem is ugly racism and, increasingly, class snobbery. In the early 20th century, as historian Richard Rothstein notes, racial zoning laws prevented Black people from buying in majority-white areas. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such ordinances in the 1917 case Buchanan v. Warley, he notes, communities adopted economically exclusionary zoning laws that regulated the types of homes that could be built and effectively excluded most Black people. “Such economic zoning was rare in the United States before World War I,” Rothstein notes, “but the Buchanan decision provoked urgent interest in zoning as a way to circumvent the ruling.”
Today, the motivation behind exclusionary zoning may be less overtly racist and have more to do with class bias. The most restrictive zoning is found in liberal jurisdictions, where progressive whites might even take pride that neighbors of theirs belong to racial or ethnic minorities. But as Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel suggests, the prevailing American ethos of meritocracy—which appropriately disavows racism and sexism—has also given rise to “the last acceptable prejudice,” a disdain for the less-educated. Social scientists have found that highly educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.”
Today, the motivation behind exclusionary zoning may be less overtly racist and have more to do with class bias.
Some white liberals living in exclusive neighborhoods may fervently oppose Trump’s wall on the Mexican border as racist but support zoning walls that make it unlikely that any recent immigrants will be able to afford to live in their neighborhoods. As Brookings scholar Richard Reeves has noted, “Walking around my own rich, liberal suburban cocoon, I pass many signs declaring that ‘Hate Has No Home Here.’ In my more cynical moments, I fantasize about putting up some new signs next to them: ‘But Restrictive Zoning Does!’”
Apart from class bias, exclusionary zoning can serve the financial interests of homeowners. By artificially limiting the supply of housing in a community, bans on duplexes and triplexes prop up home prices just as surely as oil prices rise when OPEC limits the production of oil. Government policies that drive up housing costs are absurd in a nation with a housing affordability crisis, Lind argues. In recent years, she writes, nearly 38 million Americans were “cost burdened,” meaning they paid more than 30 percent of their income on rent or mortgages. When housing costs are so high for people, they are forced to make terrible choices. Lind writes: “[A]ffordability is literally a lifesaver. People who spend less on housing costs have more money to spend on food and medical care.”
It doesn’t have to be this way, Lind says. Historically, many municipalities developed an array of housing options. For example, in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago and its nearby suburbs, fully one-quarter of the housing stock is made up of two- and four-flat buildings. In other nations, from Singapore to Germany, the government provides incentives for multifamily and multigenerational housing.
Zoning reform on the lines carried out in Minneapolis can move America in the right direction, Lind says. When the California legislature adopted changes to allow single-family homes to add “accessory dwelling units,” activists said it was “like opening a floodgate.” In 2018, Lind reports, Los Angeles permitted more than 4,000 units, “an astonishing figure when one considers that municipal authorities tend to add just a few hundred affordable housing units per year.” The potential is enormous: Converted garages or backyard cottages could add up to 500,000 housing units in Los Angeles.
Although Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) forces have held the reins of power for generations in America, the progress in Minneapolis, Oregon, and California suggests new possibilities for reform coalitions. Groups that are not often at the vanguard of progressive change could join with civil rights, environmental, and labor organizations. Tech employers in the San Francisco Bay Area who are having trouble recruiting talent because of housing prices have combined forces with young, largely white college-educated homeseekers to form the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) coalition for zoning reform. Meanwhile, AARP has pushed for more flexibility to build backyard cottages, both to provide older homeowners with a new source of rental income and to allow grandparents to live close to children and grandchildren (spawning the so-called PIMBY movement, Parents in My Backyard). Finally, some small-government conservatives have long championed efforts to reduce exclusionary zoning as a form of deregulation that enhances property rights and makes housing more affordable without additional government spending. In March 2020, Lind notes, Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives came together to pass the YIMBY Act to require recipients of Community Development Block Grants to report on their efforts to reduce exclusionary zoning. (The legislation did not, however, move through the Senate.)
To be sure, NIMBY forces remain a powerhouse in American politics. Donald Trump believed he could win votes by rallying America’s “suburban housewives” to protect single-family zoning and keep out low-income housing. But as Lind’s highly readable take on the place of the single-family home in American culture suggests, the country has begun to question the role of exclusionary policies that have done so much damage for so long.
