It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning

Abstract

Local planning in the United States is unique in the amount of land it reserves for detached single-family homes. This privileging of single-family homes, normally called R1 zoning, exacerbates inequality and undermines efficiency. R1's origins are unpleasant: Stained by explicitly classist and implicitly racist motivations, R1 today continues to promote exclusion. It makes it harder for people to access highopportunity places, and in expensive regions it contributes to shortages of housing, thereby benefiting homeowners at the expense of renters and forcing many housing consumers to spend more on housing. Stacked against these drawbacks, moreover, are a series of only weak arguments in R1's favor about preferences, aesthetics, and a single-family way of life. We demonstrate that these pro-R1 concerns are either specious, or can be addressed in ways less socially harmful than R1. Given the strong arguments against R1 and the weak arguments for it, we contend planners should work to abolish R1 single-family zoning.

How Do Changes in Housing Voucher Design Affect Rent and Neighborhood Quality?

“…Two distinct research designs in two different time periods yield similar results: uniform increases in the rent ceiling appear to benefit landlords and not tenants. 5 Finally, we study the effects of tilting the rent ceiling by examining a recent demonstration project in the Dallas, Texas metro area. Housing authorities in Dallas switched from a single metro-wide ceiling to ZIP-code-level ceilings in 2011.…”

“…Our sample consists of voucher holders in 2010 and 2013. In our first stage we predict the payment standard for voucher holder i in ZIP code j at time t ( r ̅ ijt ) using equation (5). For voucher household i in ZIP code j in year t ∈ { 2010, 2013} , 1(Pos t t ) is a dummy for 2013, FM R j is the applicable FMR level in 2011 for ZIP code j , and b ijt is set of dummy variables for the number of bedrooms interacted with the year.…”

“…Rents at the ZIP code-level were highly responsive to the policy change, as shown in Figure 8. Online Appendix Table 6 reports results from equations (5) and (6). Changes in FMRs are a strong predictor of changes in rent ceiling, with a coefficient of $0.62.…”

A housing supply absorption rate equation

“…2 The academic debate surrounding the effect of planning changes on the rate of housing supply and prices remains hotly contested (Manville et al , 2020;Rodríguez-Pose & Storper, 2020;Cowan, 2019;Monkkonen, 2019;Wiener, 2020;Manville, 2019;Wegmann, 2019). Despite this, the pop-culture position seems to be that planning has extremely large effects on housing affordability (see, for example, Cowan (2019) and Yglesias (2012)), leading to radical planning reform proposals (MHCLG, 2020;Wiener, 2020;Hansen, 2020).…”

“…Static models predominantly influence housing policy, especially the push to relax planning limits on density, despite known parameter effect reversals in dynamic models (Manville, 2019;Glaeser & Gyourko, 2018;Kendall & Tulip, 2018;Lees, 2018;Kulish et al , 2012;Murray, 2020a). In Titman's (1985) real-options approach, density constraints can increase the rate of new housing supply by reducing the payoff from delaying and building higher density in the future.…”