Reforms for a Housing-Ready city

Sharing the new Strong Towns toolkit

Strong Towns just released our Housing-Ready toolkit. The toolkit proposes and teaches six key policies that we believe every city in America could (and should) adopt. These reforms are practical, common sense measures that are relevant and tractable across the nation.

Here’s a brief overview of the policy recommendations, and why I think they’re so important. I think of the six policies as responding to three distinct problems, so let’s look at them in pairs.

Enable existing homeowners to add housing supply

There’s a significant mismatch in housing supply and demand today. Many empty nesters live in houses they’ve outgrown: the house itself has several extra rooms, or there’s a big back yard that’s a lot of work to maintain, or both. They may be house-rich and cash-poor. They’d like to downsize, but don’t want to move, and can’t scale down within their community.

When homeowners have space they aren’t using, we should allow them to repurpose that space. Imagine an elderly widow in a large single family home struggling with inflation. She’s lived there for forty years, is deeply rooted in the community, and has no desire to move. Converting one or two rooms into an apartment would give her cashflow to help pay her bills, and create an affordable place for a local librarian or daycare worker to live within the neighborhood they serve.

The first two policies are opportunities for cities to affirmatively unlock supply in established neighborhoods without causing displacement or tearing down the existing housing stock.

Policy #1: Allow single-family home conversion to duplex or triplex, by right.

Converting the extra bedrooms, or unused basement of a house to allow space for a renter is easy and cheap compared to building new apartment buildings, and it can provide both a source of affordable housing for the renter and helpful income for the owner. Cities should allow this by right.

Policy #2: Permit backyard cottages in all residential zones.

In the urbanist discourse these are usually called ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units), but at Strong Towns we prefer to call them Backyard Cottages. When talking to normal people you have to explain what an “ADU” is, but “Backyard Cottage” is self-explanatory, and sounds warm and cozy.¹

There’s been great progress in allowing backyard cottages around the country, and cultural awareness and acceptance is growing. Now is the moment for cities to fully normalize and embrace this housing type, permitting it by right in every residential zone.

Stop requiring luxury

In pre-war America most housing in cities was built on 25’ wide lots, and sometimes smaller. Building were often modest, a single floor built first and an addition added on top years later. By mid-century we started to spread out to larger lots, but it was still common to start with a small, affordable house early in life, and to add on to the house over the years.

Since most of us need a lot less housing when we are young (and earn less) than we do when we’re in mid-life (and earn more), this created a virtuous cycle where people could climb the ladder incrementally over time.²

In the post-war era most cities passed laws to cut off the bottom of the ladder, requiring large homes on large lots in the majority of the city’s land. The next two policies are opportunities for cities to legalize entry level housing again.

Policy #3: Legalize starter homes in all residential zones

One of the reasons housing is more expensive today is that we don’t build small houses, and in many cases this is because our zoning doesn’t allow it! Cities often require a minimum dwelling size, such that small houses aren’t allowed to be built in large percentages of the city.

As a starting point, cities should remove minimum house size requirements and to clear the path for individuals to save money by starting small.³

Policy #4: Eliminate minimum lot size requirements in existing neighborhoods.

Land isn’t free, and large lots require use more infrastructure, which also drives up costs.

Just like we should not require people to build more house than they need, we should not require people to buy more land than they need. Cities like Durham, NC have opened up more options for affordable housing by reforming these rules and allowing homes to be built on smaller lots. The rest of the country should follow suit.

Remove unnecessary friction

There’s an important role for cities to play as providers of public services and stewards of our commons. But many cities have gone too far when it comes to regulating development and land use, making the process so slow and cumbersome that it’s difficult to adapt to changes in housing needs.

The last two policies are reforms to help cities step out of the way where they aren’t providing value.

Policy #5: Repeal parking mandates for housing.

Parking mandates significantly drive up the cost of housing, acting as a binding constraint that caps the number of units that can be built, or requires large buildings with structured parking (ie expensive units), even when the parking isn’t needed.

The most glaring case is apartments, where cities often have rules requiring 2 or more parking spaces per unit, regardless of how many people will actually live there. But parking requirements can also rule out townhomes in walkable areas (where many homeowners would be fine with just one car instead of two), or backyard cottages for elderly parents who no longer drive, etc.

Thanks to the work of Donald Shoup, parking is one of the best understood pieces of city policy, and the verdict is simple. Cities don’t need to require parking because nobody knows better than the property owner how much parking their building needs, and plenty of it will be built anyway. We can unlock much more flexibility in land use by getting the city out of the way.⁴

Policy #6: Streamline the approval process.

Uncertainty around approvals and drawn-out permitting process create a substantial disincentive to new development. The problem is so significant that professional Real Estate Developers think of “ability to get permission” as one of the core value-creating service they provide.

You shouldn’t need deep pockets, a long timeline, and expert services to add on to your house, convert a basement to an apartment, or build a cottage in your backyard. Even for developers who have those resources, we don’t need to delay them for months or years when they just want to do modest, incremental projects like rebuilding an old house as a new duplex.

The goal should be 24-hour approval time (or less) for incremental housing projects, and proactive outreach to citizens to help them learn what they can do and how easy it is to get the approvals they need. Some cities have taken this further and created pre-approved plans.

We encourage cities to experiment and innovate, to streamline their approval process for straightforward projects, and unleash citizens to respond to the needs of their community.

Conclusion

There is no one silver bullet that will fix housing problems across the entire country, but we believe these policies are the best, and most broadly applicable starting point that will help get our cities on the right track.

I was fortunate to be part of our housing working group, which contributed to this effort by gathering developers, architects, and planners from across the country to study what worked and what didn’t in their communities and businesses. I’m really proud of the work that went into this, and with the final result. And I’m confident that cities that embrace this approach will see significant improvement to local housing affordability.

For a deeper dive please download the toolkit — and then share it with local advocates and elected officials in your community!

1. ADU is technically a broader term that can mean both accessory structures on the lot, or secondary units within the main building. Since most of the “ADU discussion” is about allowing accessory buildings on the lot, and accessory apartments are already covered by the idea of a “duplex” or “triplex” conversion, we think that distinction isn’t really necessary.

2. New neighborhoods matured in the same way; starting with a wave of modest starter homes, they evolved into more varied and complex typologies as the needs of the residents changed and the buildings they owned followed suit.

3. Zoning isn’t the only problem — construction costs are high, overzealous building codes require overbuilding, and the mortgages that financed starter homes from the 50s to the 90s are no longer available to most entry level buyers (which makes it hard for builders to sell them). But if small houses aren’t legal to build in the first place, there’s no opportunity to solve the other obstacles.

4. Beyond Shoup’s research into historical oversupply of parking, it’s reasonable to predict that we’re already past peak parking demand as a nation due to rise of ride-sharing as an alternative that makes “extra cars” for occasional use less valuable. Autonomous vehicles could greatly accelerate that trend.