Is banning single-family housing the way to solve the affordable housing crisis?
Jon Gorey
Globe Correspondent
BostonGlobe.com
December 22, 2021 5:22 pm
Excerpt:
“Single-family zoning wasn’t created as a means to exclude, but it very quickly kind of became a means of exclusion,” said Christopher Ptomey, executive director of the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing.
Cities and towns wield a powerful tool to control their built environment, dictating what can go where within their borders: zoning. It’s why you can’t just open up a laundromat in your garage — some areas are zoned for commercial, industrial, or mixed uses, while others are set aside for residential homes.
And in most communities around Greater Boston, more than 80 percent of the available land is zoned solely for single-family homes, according to the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. That makes it illegal or next to impossible to, say, convert a finished basement into a rental unit or to build even modestly sized multifamily dwellings, like the region’s familiar three-deckers, in much of suburbia.
There’s nothing wrong with single-family houses, of course. But not everyone wants (or, more to the point, can afford) to live in one. In fact, not even half of Boston-area households live in a detached single-family home, according to American Community Survey data. And by restricting nearly all residential development to the postwar ideal of a freestanding home on a large — and therefore expensive — lot, communities can essentially keep many lower-income people out, maintaining patterns of housing segregation that formed in the early and mid-20th century.
“Single-family zoning wasn’t created as a means to exclude, but it very quickly kind of became a means of exclusion,’’ said Christopher Ptomey, executive director of the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing.
Simply put, single-family zoning rules — or “apartment bans,’’ as they’re sometimes called — are a big reason housing is so scarce, expensive, and exclusive in certain places. “Zoning for single-family houses has been … one of the major contributing factors to the crisis of housing supply and affordability,’’ said Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge.
By continuing to outlaw more affordable housing types — namely condos, town homes, and rental apartments — “single-family zoning today makes it more difficult to address the equity problems it’s caused historically,’’ Ptomey said. That has led housing advocates, economists, and lawmakers to ask the same question: If single-family zoning helped create our affordable housing shortage, and tends to perpetuate historic patterns of inequity and segregation, why not get rid of the cause?
Jon Gorey blogs about homes at HouseandHammer.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @jongorey. Subscribe to our free real estate newsletter at pages.email.bostonglobe.com/AddressSignUp.
