Odd headlines about small towns in the San Francisco Bay Area keep popping up.
First Woodside, a small suburb where many Silicon Valley CEOs live, tried it It declares itself home to the mountain lion To evade a new California law that enabled single-family homeowners to subdivide their land to create additional housing.
Then the wealthy Atherton, with a population of 7,000 and Average home sale price $7.5 million, she tried to update the state-mandated housing plan. until very recently, 100% of Atherton’s land is set aside for housing Only single family homes are allowed on large lots. When the city council considered rezoning a few properties to allow for townhouses, vehement objections poured in from prominent locals such as the basketball star. Steve Curry The billionaire venture capitalist Mark Andreessen.
Council member argue that the town should “cross over and explain the idiosyncrasy of Atherton…to succeed in lowering (the country’s) expectations of us.”
At first glance, these might seem like extreme cases of privilege, anomalies from twisted California. But as Our new book In terms of housing bid policies, the ability of small suburban municipalities to limit multi-family housing is more the rule than the exception.
The big role of small governments in reducing housing
Adding new housing is one of the few ways to reduce escalation rentals And housing prices In high cost metro areas like San FranciscoAnd New York And Washingtonthe capital can even new “luxury” apartments or apartments Reduce competition for old units, Relieve some pressure on rents to Low-income people.
However, it can be difficult to find new residential apartments and homes near jobs. This means building them in existing communities, where small local governments often restrict housing development.
To examine the impact of opposition to small governments on housing, we used census tract data from metro areas in California to examine multi-family housing development between the Census Bureau’s 2008-2012 American Community Survey and its own in 2014-2018, a time when the housing market was recovering. quickly out of the Great Recession.
During this period, according to our statistical estimates, a typical neighborhood size census tract It is located within a city of 100,000 residents and has seen the development of 46 new multi-family units more than a very similar census area located within a smaller town of 30,000 residents. In other words, small towns, which are usually the outskirts of nature, have added far fewer multi-family units.
An additional 46 new apartments may seem like a small number, but they can make a real difference at a neighborhood level. Almost half of the census tracts in our sample—each with about 1,200 to 8,000 residents—acquired five or fewer multi-family units.
Cities across the United States are facing similar struggles
This pattern of slower rates of multi-family housing development in smaller jurisdictions is not unique to the Bay Area.
When we examined census data from metro areas across the country, we similarly found Neighborhoods in smaller jurisdictions have gained fewer multi-family units. We considered a long list of economic, geographic, and demographic factors that can influence neighborhood growth rates, as well as jurisdiction size.
Most major American cities in high-cost areas—such as Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles—are surrounded by a sea of mostly small, independent suburbs.
In many of these communities, residents actively participate in local politics Fighting increases in density and multi-family housing. As new housing proposals veer away from these smaller communities, housing is either not built, thus increasing rents by limiting the housing supply, or is pushed to the outlying suburbs far from most jobs.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the communities with relatively high increases in housing in our study tended to be on the urban fringes, while many nearby suburbs had stagnant housing development or even declines in units.
Inner suburbs can provide housing closer to jobs
Just because a suburb is small in population doesn’t mean it’s off the beaten path or irrelevant to the area’s economy.
Atherton, for example, has maintained its estate-style residential subdivision for decades, in the midst of a function-rich district. In fact, our data shows that of the Bay Area municipalities with the best geographic proximity to employment, nearly half are small suburbs of 30,000 residents or fewer.
transportation is Largest contributor to carbon emissions in the United StatesHowever, many people end up traveling long distances because housing is limited and very expensive in job-rich areas. However, many of the inner suburban land-use plans were drawn up decades ago in vastly different economic eras, and many now claim to have been “built” and finished housing additions.
What stands in the way?
Why is the size of the municipality so important to the number of apartments and condos being built? In a word, politics.
Homeowners tend to be the dominant political interest in small suburbs. They may worry that larger or denser apartment buildings will reduce the value of their property, increase traffic or stress local infrastructure. Even small project concerns – like a proposal 16 houses Close to the Cary property in Atherton – can be enlarged.
Many homeowners in big cities certainly have similar concerns. But in a large and diverse city, anti-growth voices are often balanced by pro-housing interests active in city politics, such as large employers, developers, building unions, or affordable nonprofits.
And although a A growing group of YIMBY activists — those who advocate “yes in my backyard” — move in favor of more housing, and suburban elected officials typically feel more political wrangling from old homeowners than YIMBY activists.
How to unlock more housing when needed
State lawmakers can unlock new housing potential by asking local governments to ease single-family zoning and similar restrictions on land use. Proposed by the governor of Colorado do so in 2023, and California has passed similar laws. However, this can be politically risky. Local control of land use is a tenet in many nations.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s efforts to enact land-use reforms that would push communities to redistrict into more housing It deadlocked in that state’s legislature The year is 2023. In California, meanwhile, lawsuits by local and neighboring states over proposed projects have proliferated. And some cities — like Woodside, with its mountain lion sanctuary — are trying to creatively sidestep state rules.
States can also create incentives for local governments to approve more housing. Certain types of revenue collected by the state, such as sales taxes or gasoline taxes, can be distributed to communities based on the number of bedrooms per community, with extra credit given to affordable units. This kind of incentive might lead local officials to view the new apartments as improving the bottom line for their community.
Another approach is for state governments to create metro-level mechanisms designed to represent the needs of housing consumers across the region.
States can establish district-level housing appeals boards that are authorized to do so Reconsideration and possible cancellation of anti-housing decisions By cities and towns. Oregon has taken a more ambitious approach in its largest metropolitan area, Portland. Voters created and then reinforced an optional article metro government Not only to plan key regional land use priorities but to actually implement them.
With this big picture and power, Portland can place more residences in locations that are easier to access than other jobs and transit while protecting sensitive rural areas in the hinterland from vehicle-dependent encroachment. In other words, it can place housing where it is needed.
Paul J Lewis Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University And Nicholas J Marantz Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine.
This article has been republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons Licence. Read the The original article.