Is Single-Family Zoning Pro-Family?
Cambridge, MA becomes the first city in the U.S. to abolish exclusionary zoning and adopt a universal housing standard. Can Berkeley's ambitious plan get back on track?
This article will be free and re-released one week from today.
—
Cambridge, MA has made history by becoming the first American city to embrace international norms of land use. The city council approved a new zoning plan that allows for 4-story homes and apartments in all neighborhoods of the city without density restrictions. Massachusetts’ advocates resembled the ones in Berkeley: urbanist organizations, families in need of space, students and educators from Harvard and M.I.T., Cambridge becomes the first U.S. city to overhaul exclusionary zoning in every single neighborhood, unconditionally.
The Cambridge zoning plan gives permits to housing projects that conform with zoning without veto opportunities. Proponents of the plan also wanted feasible privately-financed low-income housing, so they wrote a 20% low-income housing requirement for projects above 10 units or between 4 and 6 stories. Under current Cambridge zoning, 85% of the city’s homes could not be built today. Now the new rules focus on setback regulations to encourage gardens and neighbor privacy but no density regulations. So long as a proposed building conforms to the height and form designs outlined in the zoning, a permit is given.
Most U.S. cities engage in spot upzoning, where very high density is allowed on a limited number of parcels or a district, which often focuses all development acquisition and speculation onto a small amount of land. Most residential districts are left alone and don’t allow new housing that isn’t 1-unit at all. This leads to dramatic increases in area land values which adversely impacts the feasibility of housing development or could even displace residents living on upzoned parcels. But with universal rezonings like Cambridge’s, the development potential is spread out and no parcel is special enough to warrant land value increases. Auckland, New Zealand cut single-family zoning down from 95% of the region to 25%. 43,000 new homes were built and rents dropped 28% compared to other N.Z. cities. I expect a similar effect in Cambridge.
Notably, both Cambridge, MA and Berkeley, CA are leading the nation on the most significant of zoning reforms in the United States, and it’s probably due to their similarities. Both are major college towns with nearly identical demographics, a highly educated populace, a prosperous local and regional economy, and one of the worst housing shortages in the U.S.
But Berkeley’s once major zoning proposal has been amended into becoming somewhat tepid. Initially, the first proposal by the Planning Commission (as I covered) was quite similar to what Cambridge passed except heights were capped at 2-3 stories. Unlike Cambridge, a large portion of Berkeley’s wealthiest neighborhoods are in hillside fire zones. While fire-conscious development can reduce firestorms by designing fire breaks and eliminating old houses that are firestorm fuel, most of Berkeley’s fire-risk neighborhoods of 15,000 people are infested with many invasive, flammable species and lousy roadways unfit for evacuation.
There was a significant uproar from hillside Berkeleyans about densifying these areas. While maintaining single-family zoning is not fire protection, I’ve been convinced that densifying these hillsides at the moment is not worth it. Even with upzoning, insurers and lenders wouldn’t support development there anyhow. The city council was correct to remove the fire zone districts from the plan and the bulk of public opposition ended when this change was made.
However, Berkeley city council several months ago decided to go even further and added some counter-productive density limits on top of the 2-3 story height limits. Form-based codes without density limits are the superior approach to urban planning that Cambridge embraced. Why? Because people don’t often know how many homes are in a building, just whether it looks nice or how tall it is. But with these density limits, Berkeley’s zoning plan is barely competitive over state ADU laws. Under state law, you can split a single-family parcel into two duplexes (four units) in a single-family zone. Under Berkeley’s pending proposal, you can instead build a fiveplex on a lot of size 5,000 square feet (a typical Berkeley lot), 6 units in a duplex zone, or 7 units in the multiplex zone. Because the city’s low-income housing requirements trigger at 5 units (instead of 10 like Cambridge’s), developers and homeowners will just stay under the 5-unit limit in single-family areas.
The biggest issue to me isn’t even the density limits but keeping the existing city zoning codes. The original plan of overhauling the entire low and middle-density residential zoning code into one code was important because Berkeley’s current zoning map is mostly nonsensical, even beyond typical American zoning maps. There is little coherency to where zones in residential sections of Berkeley switch from single-family, duplex, and small apartments. If I were to show a foreign urban planner the differences in residential zones, they would lose their mind.