Communities of majority Black, Indigenous or other people of color, as well as low-income communities, are already producing the highest numbers and ratios of affordable units: Upzoning increases gentrification in these communities

The report found that communities that are made up of majority Black, Indigenous or other people of color, as well as low-income communities, are already producing the highest number of affordable units as well as the highest ratio of affordable to market-rate units without rezoning. In comparison, the largest number of communities with an affordable housing ratio lower than 19% are white and moderate to high income communities.

Walters’ work suggests that upzoning in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods that aren’t producing their share of affordable housing can help balance things out while the same should be avoided in communities that already abound with more affordable housing to work to avoid gentrification.

ADU article: She’d like to see San Diego take an approach more like San Jose’s where the city opened up the plan design process to local design professionals and created something of a library of plan choices that offer more variety to meet the needs of different homeowners. In San Jose, that library and its easing of zoning requirements has led to an increase from the city issuing 15 ADU permits in 2015 to 414 in 2019. Through July 2020, San Jose has issued 191 permits.

CINNAMON JANZER   AUGUST 31, 2021, Next City https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/use-upzoning-sparingly-new-report-suggests

(Photo by Billie Grace Ward / CC BY 2.0)

In 2018, the City of Minneapolis was lauded in the national press for its city-wide elimination of single-family zoning. “How Minneapolis Freed Itself From the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes” Erik Trickey wrote in Politico; “Minneapolis Saw That NIMBYism Has Victims,” Richard D. Kahlenberg wrote in The Atlantic; “Minneapolis, Tackling Housing Crisis and Inequity, Votes to End Single-Family Zoning” Sarah Mervosh wrote in the New York Times; and so on.

But what happens when a city takes a blanket approach to development rather than a nuanced one that considers the differences of different neighborhoods? Are the outcomes inherently positive? A new report brings the approach into question.

Released late last month by New York City’s Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, the report examined new residential construction completed within both rezoned and non-rezoned areas of the city since 2014. Chiefly, it analyzed how many deeply affordable units were built in those areas since 2014, as well as the ratio of affordable to market rate housing.

Ultimately, Chris Walters, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development land use policy coordinator who wrote the report, found stark differences between the rezoned areas and the non-rezoned areas. The report also found that rezonings have different effects in different communities.

“Specifically, neighborhood upzonings in BIPOC, low-income communities are where these rezonings are really going to cause more harm than good,” Walters says. “That’s been the sense of [the Association] for a while. This was, let’s look at the numbers and put more numbers behind the argument.”

Walters and team studied neighborhoods across the city where rezonings have occurred, and compared them to neighborhoods that hadn’t been rezoned. They also looked at projects where just a few parcels of land were rezoned at a time. They found that these targeted rezonings produced a higher ratio of affordable housing to market-rate housing than the city’s average of 19%, whereas any neighborhood-scale rezoning, whether the neighborhood was upzoned or downzoned, produced a lower-than-citywide-average ratio of affordable housing.

Further, the report found that communities that are made up of majority Black, Indigenous or other people of color, as well as low-income communities, are already producing the highest number of affordable units as well as the highest ratio of affordable to market-rate units without rezoning. In comparison, the largest number of communities with an affordable housing ratio lower than 19% are white and moderate to high income communities.

Essentially, Walters’ data backs up the fact that more affordable housing is already (being built) in low-income BIPOC communities and that those communities have the most to lose by new development that brings in market-rate housing. Walters used ratios of affordable to market rate housing to “get at the impact of too many housing units that don’t serve the current residents of a neighborhood,” he says.

“Obviously the lowest income New Yorkers are the most rent burdened, overcrowded, and least able to withstand any changes, be that loss of income with scores of evictions being filed in neighborhoods worst hit by COVID, which are all neighborhoods of color,” Walters adds. “Or be it market changes and gentrification that comes, in part, from an influx of units that are out of reach for current residents.”

For Walters, the report addresses “the city’s approach, which is to use these rezonings in an overarching fashion, saying that we can apply the same tool in different neighborhoods without realizing or acknowledging that it’s going to have different impacts in different neighborhoods.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s housing policy has largely revolved around neighborhood rezonings, Curbed reported last year. In 2015, his administration outlined a goal of creating 300,000 affordable apartments by 2026, by rezoning neighborhoods, allowing for new development, and mandating that developers building in the rezoned neighborhoods produce a certain percentage of affordable units.

Walters’ report also found that NYC neighborhoods that were not rezoned also produced less affordable housing. But de Blasio’s rezonings — six of which have occurred — have so far occurred in predominantly low-income, minority neighborhoods, those least able to withstand the market changes Walters refers to.

In Minneapolis, Will Delaney, associate director of Hope Community, Inc., a neighborhood group based in the city’s Phillips community, says that the report’s findings ring true to his experience. “One of the things we saw here in Minneapolis was the big deal that was made over the city eliminating single family zoning,” he says.

“While I totally agree that single family zoning is by its nature part of our country’s history of racial segregation and exclusionary housing policy, it’s more nuanced and just eliminating it does not, in fact, actually repair the harms of it,” Delaney says. “If you just undo that but leave everything else the same, the research is laying out what we know to be true—the same winners and losers in the current market will win and lose based on this.”

“For communities of color like the folks who live in Phillips,” he continues, “just eliminating single family zoning doesn’t make them any more able to benefit or build wealth through housing. If anything, it makes it easier for gentrification to happen, which is something we’ve been seeing at a large scale all over our neighborhood.”

For Walters, the answer lies in treating rezoning and upzoning as what they are—one housing tool among many that should be used where appropriate. Ultimately, Walters’ work suggests that upzoning in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods that aren’t producing their share of affordable housing can help balance things out while the same should be avoided in communities that already abound with more affordable housing to work to avoid gentrification.

“We’re not anti-development,” he says, “but we’re primarily interested in housing that serves the true needs of the city and there are different ways to [meet those needs] in different types of neighborhoods.”

This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our twice-weekly Backyard newsletter.

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San Diego Aims to Spur More Backyard Homes with Free Floor Plans

CINNAMON JANZER   AUGUST 4, 2020, Next City

A backyard cottage (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Caitlin Bigelow grew up in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb. “My parents were both journalists,” she said, until her mom quit her job to care for Bigelow and her brother. “Money was tight on one salary. They rented out the granny flat that was attached to the garage. It was teeny tiny, but they rented to a SDSU student and that was the difference that paid the mortgage.”

It’s this distant memory that fuels Bigelow’s passion for accessory dwelling units — small secondary units that share the property of a larger, more primary home. “I grew up seeing the benefits that these bring to families, not only economic stability but social stability. Grandparents can live on the property with you. There are so many wonderful things about these units,” she says. “When I saw [California’s] regulations passed in 2017 that allowed homeowners across the state to build these things, I thought ‘this is going to be a game-changer for families and for California,’ so I quit my job and started Maxable,” a company that offers ADU consulting and services to Californians.

As Next City previously reported, the regulations Bigelow refers to are a set of reforms passed in 2017. As of this year, additional state laws were put in place to further promote the development of ADUs, this time including “junior accessory dwelling units” which the state considers to be ADUs that total 500 square feet or less. The driving force behind these changes is a desire to build more ADUs as a response to the state’s growing housing crisis. In many California cities, vast expanses are dedicated to single family zoning, even as housing prices are out of reach for many. In San Diego, the housing crisis is especially dire—just 24 percent of households are able to afford the median home price in San Diego County: $655,000.

“San Diego is really limited in the amount of vacant land left to develop. A lot of that is due to its environmentally sensitive lands,” says Gary Geiler, the development services director for the City of San Diego. “We protect a lot of canyons and hillsides. Half of the floodplain area is beaches and bluffs, so the developable land is pretty much developed, so we’re looking at fill-in development to add housing.”

One of the strategies San Diego County deployed last fall to further support ADU development was offering free, pre-approved ADU floor plans and waiving $15,000 in permit and development fees to reduce the costs associated with construction.

“We’ve had companion unit regulations on the books since the 90s,” Geiler says, “but they were more design-oriented and required conditional use permits. We didn’t get a lot of applications, maybe 10 in a year.” These days, those numbers are way up. “In 2017… we got an increase of over 100 applications that first year, so we said, ‘OK, we’re onto something here.’” The city has since done away with even more fees. “The applications increased even further,” Geiler says. “We had probably over 300 applications in 2018 and over 600 in 2019. So far we have about 200 new units this year and about 1,000 units applied for.”

While Bigelow is quick to give the city and county credit for all they’ve done to promote ADUs, she sees room for improvement when it comes to the pre-approved plans. “What it means is that those plans have structural pre-approval. It doesn’t mean that you can go into the county office, choose a plan, and pull a permit,” she says. “You still have to hire an architect or a designer to draw up a plan to show how it will fit on the property to show that it’s still in compliance.”

She also just doesn’t like the pre-approved plans. “They’re not good,” she says. “The plans aren’t what people are looking for. They have a 650-square-foot studio which is a nice size large one-bedroom. It shouldn’t be a studio. The other is an 800-square-foot one bedroom and it should be a two-bedroom.”

Bigelow also says that while the pre-approved plans can save money on the design and planning side of things, the construction associated with them isn’t necessarily the cheapest.

She’d like to see San Diego take an approach more like San Jose’s where the city opened up the plan design process to local design professionals and created something of a library of plan choices that offer more variety to meet the needs of different homeowners. In San Jose, that library and its easing of zoning requirements has led to an increase from the city issuing 15 ADU permits in 2015 to 414 in 2019. Through July 2020, San Jose has issued 191 permits. She also sees the efforts of cities like Minneapolis which have done away with single family zoning entirely as another major step in the right direction for the proliferation of ADUs.

As the San Diego push for ADUs is meant to increase available housing stock, the city has restricted renting them out for terms less than 30 days, as an attempt to discourage short-term rentals on sites like Airbnb. There have been reports that homeowners aren’t complying, however. “[Short-term rentals] aren’t allowed because… [the program] is for our housing stock, it’s not for hotel or motel kind of uses,” Geiler says. “Most neighborhoods are happy we’re doing that and it’s not going to change anytime soon.”

Geiler and the city continue to improve the city’s ADU processes. He’s setting his sights on further improvements, like reducing parking requirements.

This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our twice-weekly Backyard newsletter.