Inclusionary Zoning

Pioneer Press Sat, 5 Jul 2008 06:56:39 MDT
The good news about, and good reasons for, affordable housing

The Pioneer Press' three-part series on affordable housing in the suburbs sheds light on a critical public policy issue. But readers could easily come away with an impression of hopelessness: neighbors angrily condemning affordable housing developments, residents of those properties feeling embattled, cities piling on regulations, and developers forced into building only luxury housing. That's not the full picture of affordable housing in the suburbs. Nor does it reflect the fact that there is good reason to believe we can do better in making our communities welcome to all. ... One of the most promising and underutilized tools for generating affordable units is Inclusionary Zoning. With IZ, a city expects a developer to include some affordable units in his or her new development in return for providing incentives to make it work financially for the developer. Typically, we look mostly to government subsidies to make housing units affordable; the beauty of IZ is that it can produce affordable units for households in the $40,000-income range without government subsidies. More than 400 cities in the U.S. have adopted some form of IZ, including Boston, Denver, Chicago, New York, and many smaller cities. For IZ to work, cities have to make sufficient concessions so that developers don't have to build the affordable units at a loss. The most common concession is a density bonus â€" allowing the developer to build more units on the same parcel of land. Even modest increases in density can have a boost for affordability, and the good news is we now know how to design higher-density housing to avoid the problems of the past. A number of cities here now use density bonuses, but we can do much more with this and with other incentives cities can offer. Many cities want to do the right thing in diversifying their housing supply; they just need more tools such as IZ. Now is a great time for citizens to play a role in nudging their local government in the right direction. All metro cities are rewriting their comprehensive plans for submission to the Metropolitan Council by the end of this year. Cities must include in those plans how they will meet their affordable housing goals for the next decade. Showing up at a public hearing and urging local officials to adopt IZ and similar strategies is one small but effective step toward more inclusive communities. Tim Thompson is president of the Housing Preservation Project, a St. Paul-based public interest law firm that uses legal and advocacy strategies to preserve and expand the supply of affordable housing. His e-mail address is tthompson@hppinc.org. More information on the role of local governments in affordable housing is available at www.TCHousingPolicy.org.

[[keywords: Housing;Metro;]]