The hidden double standards driving our housing crisis |
Malone Park Commons in Memphis. | Courtesy of Andre D. Jones.
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that, for more than a century, American urban planning has been devoted to layering on ways to all but ban apartment buildings. And so, as the US now tries to shift out of the anti-density gear that’s driving our housing affordability crisis, policymakers are finding that there are obstacles hiding in a lot of places. Like, a lot.
States and cities are already working, little by little, to roll back the foundational problem often blamed for the current housing shortage: our rigid system of zoning, which dictates what kinds of buildings can be built where. Exclusionary zoning is the reason that it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home on most residential land in the US, making homes scarce, spread out, and unaffordable.
Less appreciated but perhaps just as culpable are the labyrinthine rules governing how new homes must be built — the materials, safety features, and other requirements that make up the entrails of American buildings.
Increasingly, housing abundance advocates, home builders, and policymakers are discovering that fixing zoning is merely the entry point into a gauntlet of other constraints. Especially in the quest to build more “missing middle” housing — duplexes, triplexes, and small and mid-size apartment buildings. “Simply allowing a fourplex on paper does not guarantee that one will be built,” John Zeanah, the chief of development and infrastructure for Memphis, wrote in a recent report on non-zoning barriers to housing for the Center for Building in North America, a nonprofit that advocates for reforming US and Canadian building codes to align them with other affluent countries.
Why? Even as cities re-legalize the traditional housing forms that once supported economic mobility and urban vitality in America, extremely strict, sometimes ill-considered building codes and other requirements can quickly make them financially infeasible to build.
Many of our building codes are rooted in important safety needs — they’re the reason why residential fire deaths have been greatly diminished and why we can enjoy convenient electricity without getting shocked all the time.
But in the US, a morass of construction codes, fire safety requirements, utility rules, and even tax policies, treat even small multifamily buildings fundamentally differently from the way they treat single-family homes. Anything larger than a duplex is regulated under building codes as a commercial building rather than a residential one, even though apartments are, obviously, residences. That saddles multifamily homes with costly construction requirements that housing advocates argue are not evidence-based and can balloon the cost of building to crippling levels.
As a result, it costs significantly more per square foot to build multifamily homes in the US (and in Canada, which has similar codes) compared to single-family homes, a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America found last year. This is not the case in peer countries, because of the economies of scale that often otherwise come with building multifamilies.
If the words “building codes” make you want to crawl into bed and take a nap — I get it. But consider that all of this converges on a more profound point about American culture. At seemingly every level of policy, we penalize and stigmatize apartments as though they’re a second-class form of housing. The last century-plus of urban planning has shaped the deeply rooted American reverence for single-family home ownership, adding up over time to thousands of little rules that stack the deck against denser, more affordable homes.
Building codes are “supposed to be this technocratic process focused on safety, when in reality there are all sorts of values and biases embedded within them,” Jesse Zwick, a Santa Monica city council member and author of a recent report on American building codes, said on the UCLA Housing Voice podcast last year.
Here are just a handful of ways that seemingly obscure rules can thwart building missing middle housing in America.
1. The cost cliff for small multi-family buildings, explained by… sprinklers
Building codes revolve, to a great extent, around fire safety — quite understandably and importantly, given our country’s traumatic history with deadly fires. But the process by which the codes are written in the US, and their appropriateness for small- and medium-scale multifamily homes, is under growing scrutiny.
In the US, building codes are drawn from models developed by a private........