Increasing Equality with Multi-Family Homes
Single-family zoning laws disproportionately affect lower-income families, and cities are finally doing something about it
Like many others, I have picked up a new hobby during quarantine: browsing Zillow. Part of this is genuine interest in buying property, but, let’s be honest, it’s mostly just fun to remove the “Max Price” filter and look at beautiful houses while imagining what it would be like to live there.
When people look for their dream houses, rarely are they apartments or duplexes, they’re almost always single-family homes in nice suburbs. This makes sense; most people want more space, a nice yard, no shared walls, a garage. With more land, though, comes more taxes, more maintenance, and just overall higher costs. These costs prevent many people from being able to own a single-family home, making them reliant on those multi-family housing solutions.
However, single-family zoning, local restrictions which dictate the types of housing that can and can’t be built in a certain area, has long been a tactic for keeping those houses with yards and garages “protected” in the suburbs. It shouldn’t be a surprise that what this really means is keeping lower-income groups, which tend to be racial minorities, out.
This week, we’ll look at the history of single-family zoning and how cities are re-thinking their neighborhoods to increase the number of affordable housing solutions.
A History of Exclusion
As I mentioned, single-family zoning designates certain areas to be solely for the development of single-family, detached homes. In many American cities, 75% of all residential land is reserved for only single-family homes; this means no apartments, condos, duplexes, triplexes, etc. While there can be benefits to keeping apartments out of certain neighborhoods, like limiting noise pollution and population density, the origin of zoning has ties to racism.
In the 1917 Supreme Court case Buchanan v. Warley, Buchanan argued that a Louisville law which prohibited Black people from living on a block where the majority of residents were white was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court’s decision, agreeing with Buchanan that the law was unconstitutional. The victory was short lived, however, since many states then turned to zoning as a way to effectively do the same thing without mentioning race. This is because Black people were much less likely to afford a single-family home, as is still true today.
Putting an End to Zoning
Ending zoning regulations has been talked about much more in recent years. A few months ago, Sacramento became one of the first cities, joining Portland and Minneapolis, to eliminate single-family zoning, passing a plan that would allow homes to include up to four units. The units in these multi-family homes would rent for much less than the entire home would, significantly lowering the barrier of entry into more expensive neighborhoods.
Being able to move into these neighborhoods has cascading benefits. For instance, suburban neighborhoods often have access to better school districts, which can have a huge impact on students’ futures. In a 2010 study in Maryland, it has been shown that low-income students who got to attend affluent schools significantly outperformed low-income students in high-poverty schools.
Since duplexes and other multi-family homes are owned by one group which rents out the individual units, it can be argued that increasing multi-family homes doesn’t really address the issue of homeownership. But I think it does. We only have so much land, so allowing only one family to live on a lot produces an artificial demand due to lack of supply, thus driving housing prices even higher. Allowing neighborhoods to “up-zone” increases the housing supply and, ideally, makes homes more affordable.
I often find myself complaining about the construction happening outside of my apartment and have said that it’ll all get better once I move to the suburbs. In researching for this article, I started to see my view of a suburban neighborhood change from one that’s quiet and lined with spacious homes to one that still has the same home exteriors (duplexes, after all, look pretty much like regular houses), but has a variety of backgrounds and socio-economic families. After all, communities with distinct and unique character are the ones that make a city special, not the ones with just rich white people.