Including Affordable Housing Somehow

by Tony Chavira

I’ve written about inclusionary zoning before in a very negative light for a very deliberate reason. Inclusionary zoning is a way to organize our neighborhoods to include a certain amount of affordable units each time new housing is built. For example, developers who want 100 units might need to make 10 of them “affordable.” Across the wider spectrum of society, lots of homebuilding means lots of affordable housing. That is, as long as stuff’s always being built.

What I argued is that the proposal for inclusionary zoning is flawed in that it always depends on a middle class that wants middle-income homes that is larger than a lower class that wants low-income homes. And right now that’s our biggest problem: everyone wants affordable units and no one wants to pay more than $100,000 for a home if they can absolutely avoid it. Because of our economic situation, the foreclosure rate reached an all-time high, Americans have the least amount of money saved of people in all Western countries, a historically high number of people receives federal unemployment, and previously expensive homes are now available for Section 8 housing to make up for demand. If no one’s going to buy a home at “market rate” (quotation marks added for both emphasis and sarcasm), how exactly are we going to develop enough of anything to warrant including affordable units in that equation?

A little background: the real reason we call it “inclusionary zoning” is because its proponents are trying to fight off a horrible practice, more common than you might think, called “exclusionary zoning,” in which people in communities adopt practices to keep the riff-raff out and the wealthy socialites in. This gained a lot of popularity in the 1960s with overlapping zoning and design standards that you might still see today in a lot of places, with ordinances that require your lawn to be green and well-maintained, or your fence to only be so tall, or your house to always have a fresh coat of paint on it. If you can’t afford that maintenance, you’ll either get kicked right out of the neighborhood or you won’t be let into the neighborhood in the first place. It’s similar to a homeowner’s association in that way, except that it’s local government-mandated.

I can pinpoint the advent of exclusionary zoning with the court case, Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. The year was 1926; Queen Elizabeth II was born, Harry Houdini died, and Benito Mussolini’s assassination attempt was a complete failure. But in the town of Euclid, Ohio, something wicked had begun under the auspices of good intentions. The Ambler Realty Company was beginning to industrialize the suburbs of Cleveland, and the well-to-do city of Euclid needed to keep Ambler and its industrial growth at bay. By limiting zoning, adopting height restrictions on building, and instituting class and size restrictions throughout the city, Ambler was officially cut off from developing on its own property. Naturally, the developer sued the city. And lo, despite the efforts of the town denizens, the city lost in the lower court after a last minute attempt to work out a deal and dismiss the case. When it was finally appealed in front of the Supreme Court, the justices also denied the case a dismissal ... but instead sided with the town and stopped Ambler in its industrial-development tracks. After the dust had settled, the village of Euclid asked for a friend-of-the-court brief from lawyer (and urban planner) Alfred Bettman, and in a particularly telling statement (in regards to how the case would later affect the exclusion of low-income people), he called zoning a police power measure that served as a kind of nuisance control. Although zoning—as a concept—had only begun to take shape by 1926, because of this case it was already considered to have the power to control development and reshape communities entirely. In this case, industrial buildings were the nuisance and they were dealt with summarily.

This is pretty much how things went until Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Township of Mount Laurel in 1975. This was, in my opinion, the NAACP’s finest moment: in a time when bringing direct instances of racial segregation to court was somehow seen as faux pas, the NAACP decided to take on Mount Laurel by claiming that its residents deliberately (and shamelessly) excluded low- and middle-income families. Clearly the lower economic classes were the “nuisance.” What I found wild about this case was that the state of New Jersey’s defense was simply that its zoning ordinances made it both physically and economically impossible to provide low or moderate income housing; “aw, shucks, the law we made tied our hands ... too bad, low- and middle-income black folk!” The state of New Jersey promptly shot the zoning laws down, and the NAACP went on to strike a win for both race and class in America. Naturally, the Township of Mount Laurel wasn’t going to take that ruling lying down, and still didn’t bother enforcing anything until 1983, when the NAACP had to bring another court case to make Mount Laurel obey the law and include some fucking affordable housing already.

From this broad historical perspective, the term “inclusionary zoning” might be considered an oxymoron. When zoning was actually meant to limit and deliberately exclude certain people or entities from developing, it can almost be seen as an element of NIMBYism, meant to keep people from building by enforcing local laws. What’s hard about changing this exclusionary practice is that the process of zoning has only become more convoluted as time has gone on. If your community’s used to a rundown section of town having a ton of homes, it will most likely want it to be redeveloped as housing instead of, say, a jail. Part of that is traditionalism, part of that is anti-development sentiment, and part of that is simply the legal or political complexities of changing an area’s zoning. Think about it this way: how would you feel if a park area (which was pretty rundown) was demolished and turned into an industrial zone? Or a row of outrageously expensive apartments? Would you like to live in luxury homes haphazardly inserted into the middle of a huge, rundown industrial area? Or visit your Main Street if McMansions were lined up alongside the small businesses you liked, breaking the walking pattern with long front lawns or imposing Persian Palace designs?

In most cases, though, it’s smart to integrate zoning ordinances: like putting apartments above grocery stores, building shops into businesses centers, or integrating parks into residential areas. The process of integrating these types of zoned areas may be difficult or convoluted, but it recognizes that zoned areas can’t be entirely exclusionary, because that only limits how you can use the space. Besides, if everyone in your neighborhood wants a grocery store next to the park, why should a law you put into place stop you? I want a few restaurant choices near where I work and I’d like at least one grocery store within walking distance of my home. Once you consider it common sense to integrate these different necessities into your communities, it seems weird not to integrate them economically. In fact, in a fearful rush to keep high property values or a certain “way of life,” you would be effectively excluding your neighborhood from the rest of normal society.

When you think about inclusionary zoning, the problem is not that “it doesn’t work.” It works very well, in fact, and there are always a certain amount of affordable units built whenever’s there development. The San Diego Housing Commission’s report on their progress is proof positive that a well-implemented, strategic zoning plan does create affordable units. All you need is one example to be sure that inclusionary zoning actually works, and San Diego has two.

The problem—instead—is that it’s touted by many as the definitive solution to getting more affordable housing units built, and from that perspective inclusionary zoning is a half-hearted and limiting policy. General society, knowing how effective exclusionary zoning practices are, expects that inclusionary zoning practices (once implemented) work like a charm and magically infuse the market with a cataclysmic eruption of affordable units. Then, because the process of actually developing stuff is pretty slow, when the “independently-minded public” doesn’t see uncanny results in short periods of time, they get pissed off and proclaim inclusionary zoning to be a total waste of effort. You’d think it would be obvious that you would need to study the long term effects of these kinds of programs to first see if they worked. And that once you saw a few smart ways to implement inclusionary zoning (the way the city of San Diego organized their laws), it would be a no-brainer to try and implement a similar program in your community.

In the end, the biggest problem with inclusionary zoning is that we had to implement it at all. Between 1973 and 1980 in the five-county Southern California region, something terrible happened: the average sale price of a single-family house rose from $40,700 to $115,000 and threw homeownership out of the reach of regular folks on regular salaries. And what still seems peculiarly unjust is that so many people need to pull out mortgages in order to purchase a home in the first place! It would be one thing if less than 20% of our population needed a massive loan to pay for their homes. Or less than 50%. Or even less than 75%! But in 1991, National Association of Realtors’ Home Buying and Selling Report showed that about 96% of all home buyers financed their purchases with a home loan (and 3% percent relied on two or more mortgages)!

When 96% of your target market cannot afford a product, you’d think that sellers would try to reduce that product’s price. But the median price of a home in Southern California today is now $305,000, which is a 22% increase from last year. We can only hope for laws that favor you as a consumer and not banks that are looking to use home-buying as a vehicle to make money off you. Ideally, one day all zoning will be truly inclusionary, and homes can be offered at prices all across the economic board.

But today is not that day, and inclusionary zoning isn’t inclusionary enough.

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