The Most Important Housing Reform in America Has Come to the South

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The Most Important Housing Reform in America Has Come to the South
By Henry Grabar

Braxton Winston had his epiphany in the spring of 2017 at Charlotte City Hall, watching the presentation of a city commission called the Economic Opportunity Task Force.

It sounds boring, but the matter at hand had shocked boosters in one of America’s fastest-growing places. A few years earlier, a big study led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty had ranked North Carolina’s largest city dead last in upward mobility among the 50 largest U.S. cities. Charlotte’s task force was supposed to figure out why, and much of its conclusion focused on the city’s racial segregation.

Winston, who is Black, had been doing some soul-searching of his own since the 2016 death of Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old Black father of seven killed by Charlotte police while waiting to pick his son up from the school bus. Why didn’t Scott live in a place he could walk his kids to school? Why did the police always show up armed and ready for conflict? Why was Charlotte the way it was? Winston described himself as a concerned citizen, and started hanging around city government meetings.

One big problem, Winston concluded after that 2017 presentation, was that single-family zoning restricted apartments—and the people who rent them—to just 16 percent of Charlotte’s residential land. “The task force gave me the language,” he told me. “You could see it, you could feel it, but I didn’t have the vernacular to talk about this.”

Now he does. Four years later, Winston is a city councilman and one of the most vocal advocates for the policy that Charlotte approved last week: abolishing single-family zoning. Charlotte’s Comprehensive Plan prescribes legalizing duplexes and triplexes citywide, giving more people more access to more types of housing in more neighborhoods, and undoing a policy originally intended to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ban on racial zoning by keeping renters out. “When you learn about land use, what you can put where, you see the way the map has been set up intentionally suppresses the supply,” Winston said. “Single-family zoning is one of the chief weights put on the scale to ensure the de facto segregated city that we live in.”

In Charlotte, advocates for the change said making room for more housing choices would diversify neighborhoods, increase access to high-opportunity areas, and offer lower-cost and small-scale housing choices. Those arguments may sound familiar if you follow this issue. Charlotte, which still needs to pass an ordinance to codify what’s in the plan, seems set to join cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Berkeley on the path to giving renters the option to live citywide.

***

What sets Charlotte apart from those other places—and what might make it the city to watch when it comes to evaluating the potential of land-use reforms in U.S. cities—is that it’s in the South.

That’s important for a few reasons. First, Charlotte is growing much, much faster than Portland, Minneapolis, and Berkeley: Among U.S. cities, only Houston built more new homes per capita between 2008 and 2018. And while many younger residents rent in the mid-rise apartment buildings that have exploded around the city’s light rail stations, there are few options between a big apartment building and a house on the periphery, where subdivisions continue to munch away at farmland. Infill growth in Charlotte could happen fast, with neighborhoods of detached houses turning urban overnight, similar to what’s happening in Houston. But zoning is in the way.

Second, the rise of missing-middle housing would represent a much greater leap in density for Charlotte than for a city like Berkeley, which has a rich history of multifamily construction. Like Houston, in spite of the recent downtown construction boom, Charlotte is among the country’s most sprawling and low-density cities.

Source.

[mhays]

It's amusing that some people think reducing rules is somehow authoritarian.