I regularly hear about how we need to change zoning laws to allow for more apartments to be built in single family homes zoning areas. I understand what zoning in but I’m confused what the case is for the change to the zoning.
I absolutely agree that housing prices are absurd but wouldn’t building more apartments just put more money/control in landlords/investment companies? I hear all the time that buying property is the best way to generate wealth for your family and that’s not to mention you can’t get evicted from stupid reasons if it’s your own home. The same people who seem to push for changing zoning laws seem to be very vocal about how so many people are trapped in cycles that makes it difficult to escape poverty (I do agree with that)
So can anyone explain how building more apartments wouldn’t be a Faustian bargain in the long run?
Edit: Thanks for all the responses, replying here as there’s too many helpful comments. I felt like I was just not getting it but most answers seem to confirm what I suspected. I know in my city apartment=renting while Condo=owning (usually) a part of a shared wall home that has a smaller size than most SFHs.
I wonder if the zoning could be adjusted to encourage more ownership rather than incentivizing more rentals. Perhaps having SFH zoning be redefined as owner-occupied zoning so you could have more density but it couldn’t be used as a rental scheme. You could also make allowances for “smallish” businesses near the various major crossroads.
I would think this would be something that nimby’s would be more ok with since in my own experience I feel more invested in taking care of my house/neighborhood than I ever did in all the years I spent renting
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It is true that owning a house is a really good way to secure long-term wealth for a family, but that doesn’t mean that just allowing more houses to be built will make people more wealthy. As we saw in the 2008 mortgage crisis, if you overbuild on single-family homes that are outside of many people’s price ranges, then the only way to actually sell them is to sell them to people who can’t really afford them, and the only way to do that is for banks to engage in risky lending, creating a bubble situation where a collapse becomes inevitable and many of those people will just get foreclosed on rather than building wealth.
The case for denser urban design is that apartments are more affordable, and a block of ‘gentle-density’ mixed use is far more economically productive than a block of suburbs. If there are any businesses at all in the suburbs, the reliance on cars makes large parking lots and setbacks a necessity, limiting the space for businesses. By contrast a block of 3-4 story mixed use buildings has space for many stores on the ground floors and space above that can be flexibly used as housing or office space as demand changes.
In theory, yes, this could give more power to landlords and corporate landlords, but there are ways around that. In many countries, people own individual apartments, not just landlords owning whole buildings.
“Just build more apartments” isn’t what zoning advocates are pushing for, a major goal is to build more “missing middle” housing.
See, current zoning laws mean that in most major American metro areas, developers have 2 options for what they can build: detached, single-family homes or apartment buildings. But there are so many other types of housing, like townhomes or duplexes, that people would be open to living in. Zoning reform is very much about giving people those options.
Also, zoning causes areas of a city to be divided by purpose: one section might be zoned partially/fully residential, another section might be for businesses and a third for entertainment. This causes a number of problems (excessive travel needed, boring monoculture neighborhoods) and zoning reform advocates push for “mixed use” development instead where people can live, work, and play in the same place.
If nothing else, the density of housing in the suburbs does not provide sufficient tax revenue to support infrastructure like sewage, police, firemen and so on. It’s extremely inefficient with regards to usage of tax money. Likewise, how many supermarkets, etc are used to support urban sprawl versus the number served in denser housing.
Apartments can be owned by individuals, not only by apartment complexes
It’s not just apartment buildings.
In addition to single-family homes, there’s 2-4 unit housing — duplex, triplex and quadplex where it’s all one parcel, all purchased as a single unit, but it has up to 4 separate living spaces, allowing for both owner-occupancy and tenants, or multigenerational housing where an extended family can live together to share expenses but still have separate living spaces.
There’s also accessory dwelling units, usually a small completely separate structure at the back of the lot or incorporated into a detached garage, which can be rented out or used as a “mother-in-law suite.” A big advantage of ADUs is that, unlike a multiplex where the units tend to be of similar size, ADUs tend to be a lot smaller than the main dwelling, so if the ADU is being rented out you have two families on the same lot of different socioeconomic statuses.
One of the problems driving “raise the minimum wage” and it’s evil flipside “nobody wants to work” is that people working high rent jobs still need grocery stores and restaurants and such but housing prices in high rent areas are, well, high. So low rent workers are squeezed out of living sustainably near their jobs. ADUs alleviate this problem by providing low rent housing in high rent areas.
There’s also Condos which are kind of like apartments but each apartment is actually a fully titled piece of property that you can own. Ownership is typically “walls in” and there’s a separate condo association that you must join and pay into to handles maintaining the building itself as well as the lot. And townhomes which are kind of like multiplexes but each dwelling is individually titled and they have certain shared wall responsibilities. Condos typically go vertically while townhomes go horizontally (though the difference is in who owns the dirt — a condo association owns the dirt while with a townhome the homeowner owns the dirt) – but either way you can fit more units in the same space when compared to single family homes even though all three methods have individual unit ownership.
There’s also mixed development, like housing over shops. Usually it’s a condo situation but it can just be straight up both owned on the same title and the homeowner rents out the shop or the shopowner rents out the home – though historically the resident and shopkeep were the same person. Or more separated mixed developments with light commercial and small offices mixed in with homes all on separate lots. You obviously don’t really want industrial or shopping malls in the middle of a neighborhood, but shops that serve the local community are surprisingly unwelcome in the local community in many zoning districts.
How dense the housing is and who owns it are two separate things. Condo buildings are owner-occupied. Duplexes, rowhouses, and townhomes frequently are too. Sometimes the zoning fight is just over how big the lot holding the single family home needs to be.
Meanwhile, some single family homes are rentals. You’re actually seeing more and more single family homes converted to rentals, partially because of how cost prohibitive it’s becoming for average people to buy them outright.
If a problem is trying to be solved by increasing housing density, then condos would be preferable to apartments, because those are proprties people can own rather than rent.
You are correct, building more apartments doesn’t really benefit anyone but property owners in the long run. City councils change the zoning laws to benefit the property construction companies because they lobby the city council relentlessly, and those companies tend to propose apartment projects rather than condos because apartments generate a residual income.
When people mention building more “apartments” they can also mean real estate for purchase, eg. condominiums, duplexes, 3-flats, even townhouses. The idea is just to promote more density to reduce housing costs…
But you could still build a 100 unit condo tower and sell the apartment units in it. You could build a 2 or 3 unit building and either sell it to one owner who subsidizes their housing costs by renting the other units, or sell off all units individually as condos. You could build dense townhouses with shares common space vs. each home owner having a yard around their house.
Imagine you invite 100 people for dinner and only cook 80 meals. No matter how you distribute them, 20 people are going hungry. The only solution is cooking 20 more meals.
The problem with housing is we don’t have enough where people want to live. Current zoning laws in most places make it illegal to build more homes (outside of sprawling single-detached homes) unless each development gets a one-time exception. It can take well over 5 years for developments to get permission to begin construction, and some never do. The reason housing has high returns as an investment is because we are not building enough, and zoning is a big reason why we can’t build enough homes.
Examples where zoning helped includes [several US cities](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/17/more-flexible-zoning-helps-contain-rising-rents) and [Auckland](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119023000244).
I am a professional city planner. The argument is pretty simple.
We have a large demand for housing, and low supply. Therefore: prices are high. It stands to reason that if we increase supply to match demand, prices will stabilize or come down.
What is the easiest way at local government’s disposal to increase supply? It is to remove anything *restricting* supply. Local zoning laws restrict supply. Loosen local zoning laws, you are doing “what you can” as the local government to remove barriers to supply, resulting in more housing, resulting in stabilized or lower prices….theoretically.
Now. Is this what really happens? Welcome to the debate!!!
I’ll also say that this is the fiscally and environmentally responsible thing to do for cities outside of affordability. If you grow within your existing built-up boundary, you are being much more efficient at providing services (water, sewer), making things walkable and vibrant, etc, while preserving natural areas at the same time).
Back to affordability, though:
There are a lot of aspects to this that confound the premise. The fact is, it’s not just a matter of supply and demand, it’s a matter of *what* is demanded, *what* is supplied, and *by whom* the supply and demand are being generated.
**What is demanded?** Lots and lots and lots and lots more people are living alone or want to live alone. How is that affecting things? How does that affect our current supply and what is being offered? You would think that people living alone want less space, and so apartments would be better. Yet…the average size of a new house or unit in America just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
**What is supplied?** In a lot of places, no developer actually wants to build at high densities in the way cities want. They just want to bulldoze forest and farmland for giant quilts of postage stamp lots. Not exactly what a lot of cities are going for. A lot of these small scale density increases people want (missing middle) are simply not worth it for most developers. The complexity to build a 300 unit megacomplex of luxury apartments and the complexity to build a quadplex are shockingly similar much of the time.
**Who is powering the demand?** Institutional investors and housing-as-investment-commodity-not-housing have absolutely altered the math on this. A lot of my peers don’t believe this and say their effect is marginal. I disagree. You’ve got people with infinite money playing around in housing in a way they never have. We don’t know what effect that’s having.
The research on zoning changes vs. affordability is just now starting to come in on this, [and it’s mixed.](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/land-use-reforms-and-housing-costs) Supply does seem to go up, a little. Effects on price seem muted. Some evidence suggests [rents are stabilized](https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/05/123287-where-permissive-zoning-codes-slowed-rent-growth)rather than continuing to shoot skyward. But still — there is a lot going on here (see above points) which make this a complicated thing to make a blanket statement on. We can look back historically and make assumptions, but again, see above, history may not be the perfect guide as demographics and economic realities change.
TLDR; Supply and demand says increase supply of housing, price will go down. Does it work? Theoretically, but there are lots of moving parts to this. Apart from affordability, allowing cities to densify internally has many other benefits.
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