Claim: Local zoning codes are spiking up home costs

Urban planner Nolan Gray shares three reasons why “burdensome” zoning laws exacerbate local housing (un)affordability epidemics. Meanwhile, San Jose has yet to drop its failing zoning ordinance. This interview originally appeared on Island Press’s YouTube channel.

(10:34–13:25) There’s a very, very robust literature on the relationship between zoning and housing affordability. I kind of draw three lines here:

The first is zoning makes a lot of housing just illegal to build, right?... [S]omething like 70 to 95 percent of the typical city doesn’t allow multi-family to be built in its residential areas. We allow multi-family in very small, few pockets of the city.

The second mechanism here is that zoning rules increase what we might call the quality of housing, but above and beyond what people might otherwise have demanded. So this is rules that say, “If you want to build housing, you have to have so many parking spaces, regardless of if you're going to drive,” or “If you're going to have a single-family home, it has to sit on a lot of at least a half-acre.”

Then the third is the delays… blocking mobility into high productivity regions. So historically, Americans moved from poorer and less productive parts of the United States to wealthier and more productive parts of the United States…. But zoning constraints being most tight in our most productive and prosperous places makes that mobility harder and, of course, makes us collectively less innovative and productive.

The third is something that, of course, was top of mind, especially when I was writing the book in 2020, and that's the issue of segregation…. [S]egregation isn't this accidental side effect of current zoning policies. It’s really core to the current policies, this notion that there will be different parts of the city for people of different income levels; and in the U.S. context, of course, that translates into race. And that was very deliberate in many zoning contexts.

And then the final big critique that I level is the relation between zoning and the environment…. [C]ities are one of the most incredible environmentally-friendly inventions humanity’s ever come up with. They save land, and they reduce energy consumption in a modern context. Living in a multi-family building or switching your commute over from a car to a bus or a bicycle, dramatically, it decreases your climate impact. And so zoning, of course, makes this much more difficult to do. It heavily privileges greenfield development and heavily discourages infill development.

Watch the whole thing here.

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