Single-family houses are great, single-family zoning is not

Single-family houses are great, single-family zoning is not

We need a world of choices

Matthew Yglesias

Aug 5

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Berkley, California is considering zoning reform, which is great. It is naturally prompting some political opposition, including this sign which warns that “the war on single-family homes is a war on families.”

This sort of thing worries me for two reasons.

One is that it reflects a misunderstanding of what the policy issue is, and if it spreads it will be toxic to the cause of reform. Most Americans live in single-family homes, and many of those who don’t aspire to. If people believe that zoning reform is a critique of those homes or the desire to live in them, zoning reform is likely to fail.

The other reason is that I’m afraid proponents of zoning reform may not work hard enough to correct the misperception.

After all, a significant minority of the American population does not live in detached single-family homes. And many of the people in that minority have a strong affective preference for neighborhoods full of apartments and rowhouses and have developed a resentment over the years of the normative status of the detached single-family home in the United States. Some people have developed strong aesthetic or moral hostility to suburban neighborhoods and would like to give voice to that even though it’s politically counterproductive.

What exacerbates my worries on this score is that in many experiences, a decent share of zoning reformers feel insecure about adhering to what’s basically a free market regulatory position. Politically speaking, the most important thing is to appeal to older normies with moderate views. But socially, the most important thing is to fight with leftists about who’s a sellout and who’s a real one. That encourages the adoption of edgy, radical-sounding rhetoric when in most contexts, the best thing to do is to appeal to old-fashioned American values like freedom, property rights, and the dream of abundance while reassuring everyone that if you like your detached single-family home you can keep it.

Abolitionists everywhere

The rhetorical turn that I think has been unhelpful here is that I often see reform proposals framed as an effort to “abolish single-family zoning.”

In left-wing activist circles, people like to try to associate themselves with the movement to abolish slavery, in part because abolishing slavery was really good and in part because “if we’d listened to people like you we’d have never abolished slavery” is a popular lazy rebuttal to voices calling for caution and political pragmatism. So you often end up in motte-and-bailey situations where people will say they are prison abolitionists, but then when you ask what should happen to serial killers they concede they’ll be involuntarily confined, just under circumstances so different from what prevails in the contemporary American prison system (Norway, say) as to constitute a form of abolition.

This is a dumb way to do politics but some people find it entertaining, and a similar tic leapt into the land use conversation.

But to a normal person, this carries the connotation that you are going to abolish single-family homes or somehow make it impossible to build new ones.

Yet in addition to scaring people with faux radicalism, this rhetoric often undershoots in terms of actual policy. Taking an existing set of land-use rules and mandating that you be allowed to subdivide houses into duplexes or triplexes is fine. But to generate significant additional housing you really need to make it legal to build more or larger structures. That means tackling not the number of families per structure question, but the various rules about setbacks, lot occupancy, lot size, building height, parking, floor area ratio, etc., that block new construction.

In particular, a block of rowhouses (arguably a form of single-family homes) could easily be denser than a block of detached duplexes. There is no good reason for communities to ban duplexes (or triplexes or any kind of plex), but making this the whole crux of the debate is very confusing.

To their credit, by contrast, the California YIMBYs have been very successful over the past few years in passing several aggressive laws about Accessory Dwelling Units. This is framed as a very normie, homeowner-friendly policy — why shouldn’t you be able to convert your garage or pool house into a rental if you want to? — but in some sense has already completely abolished single-family zoning throughout California. That’s how the game is played, though — you want to identify measures that are more consequential than they sound while appealing to “common sense” and widely-held values.

It’s good for people to be able to choose

There are lots of different kinds of cars in America — from pickup trucks to minivans to the small crossover SUVs — that seem very popular these days. You can even buy an old-fashioned four-door sedan if you’re so inclined, though I gather that this has become an unpopular option in most areas.

What’s more, these different vehicles are generally well-suited to people living different kinds of lifestyles. I’m in Kerrville right now where not only do a lot of people drive trucks for some work-related purpose, but basically all men seem to drive one just because it’s the thing that one does. In coastal Maine where I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year, trucks are much less common than in Texas. But they’re still far more common than they are in D.C. and the D.C. suburbs. Not that there are no trucks in D.C. But if you live in D.C. or one of the inner-ring suburbs and drive a truck, you almost certainly have a bona fide occupational reason.

It not only would be odd, socially, to drive a truck, but it’s impractical given the size of the streets and the parking spots. Again, on any given day you see plenty of trucks in D.C., but it’s not the most suitable option for an urban area. City-living singles normally drive small cars. Suburban families drive SUVs or minivans. If you heard about a young single man driving a minivan, you’d think something very odd was happening.

That being said, it’s not illegal.

When my wife first moved to D.C., she had a kind of comically large Buick SUV. I forget what the exact story was of how she came to own that vehicle, but the crux of the matter was that it was suitable to her prior job working on a political campaign in Alabama, and then she drove it to D.C. and kept using it for several years because she already had it. Now we own a gray Prius like half the other people in our neighborhood. But for a while, she was a childless person with a big SUV in the middle of the city. That’s life.

Except in the housing context where we refuse to let people decide what they want to do. City planning is extremely prescriptive, and documents are full of assertions about what is and isn’t “suitable” to various areas as if upon moving to D.C. they confiscated your SUV and forced you to buy a small hatchback. That would be extremely annoying. It would also result in a lot of hard questions for the truck-driving men of exurban Texas as to whether or not they “really need” a truck or if they should be reserved for the people who actually use them for work. If you have kids and live in the suburbs, they would make you get a big minivan. If you said you’d rather have a smaller car, and after all, families didn’t have huge vans in the 1960s, they’d say we need to protect the character of the neighborhood from interloping sedans. Then if you tried to say we should repeal this minivans-only law, people would say you were waging war on minivans and the war on minivans is a war on families.

But it’s not. It’s literally just saying that people should be able to decide for themselves what they want to do, all things considered — the way we do with other consumer choices.

A switch to strong property rights

What we do in the market for homes is treat what a person does with their private property as everyone’s business. We do that in part because what you do with your land does in fact have an impact on your neighbors. That said, this isn’t a totally unique situation. If a neighbor gets a dog, that impacts me. When I brought a little kid onto my block, that impacted our neighbors. But we’ve generally decided that letting people veto their neighbors’ decisions about having kids and pets would be a mistake.

You are allowed to build an apartment building that has a “no pets” rule and you are allowed to build a gated community that’s only for childless old people. And both of those things exist. In a world without exclusionary zoning, it will still be possible for private developers to build subdivisions that have specific internal governance rules.

But just as we don’t in general let people veto their neighbors’ decisions about pets and kids, we shouldn’t in general let people veto their neighbors’ decisions about what kind of structures can be built on their land. We should have rules about safety, like you can’t build a building that’s going to fall over. And we should have rules about environmental protection, like new structures should meet some energy efficiency standards. But these are general rules based on social ideas about the acceptable cost of safety and environmental protection rules; they’re not local vetoes based on the subjective judgment of whoever happens to be around.

If you’re a homeowner, giving up your right to veto what your neighbors do would be a significant concession. But in exchange, you would get the right to do what you want without being subject to a veto.

This is the difference, in my view, between a policy change and a tedious “NIMBY vs. YIMBY” fight. YIMBY says that you should not, subjectively, object to projects in your neighborhood. That you should say yes. A reform agenda says it’s fine for you to dislike new multifamily housing in your neighborhood just like I am allowed to be sad that a neighborhood coffee place I liked closed and was replaced by a vape shop. What I am not allowed to do is prevent the vape shop from opening or prevent the coffee place from closing. I think everyone in the neighborhood misses the coffee shop. The problem is we didn’t miss it enough to buy enough coffee to keep them in business, especially since we have other good coffee shops.

The key to this is that strong property rights have upsides for homeowners themselves. It’s not just that your neighbor can build an ADU and you can’t stop him, it’s that you can build an ADU and your neighbor can’t stop you.

The lump of traffic

An important reason to think in terms of systems rather than backyards is that normal non-ideological people worry that if more residents come to their neighborhood, it will make traffic congestion worse.

But it’s not the case that if America as a whole relaxed land use restrictions that traffic would get worse on average. On the contrary, it would get better. You’d have people living closer, on average, to where they are trying to go. And some of them in virtue of proximity and density would be walking or biking or riding public transportation. You can’t deny that traffic would get worse in some places, but it’s a little bit challenging to predict which places those would be. And some land use regulations, like requiring extra parking with every structure, pretty straightforwardly make traffic congestion worse.

Again, the point isn’t that nobody should have off-street parking or that everyone should live within walking distance of their job. But if you deregulate systematically, then the direction of the change is to less driving and less traffic. If you ask someone to just adopt a YIMBY attitude about the block they happen to live on, then it’s a hard sell. Rethinking the aggregate planning system is a “bigger” change but also a smaller ask that isn’t really about sacrifice or necessarily entailing that much change in any given community.

If you like your house, you can keep it

Most of all, it’s just important to be clear that we are not talking about some kind of massive urban renewal scheme where eminent domain seizes vast tracts of suburban land and redevelops it as mid-rise apartments.

Most people are just going to keep living in their same houses. Most of the country does not have adequate housing demand to make widespread redevelopment as multifamily as economically viable, especially because most people are willing to pay a premium for a detached house with a yard. Even where the economics would support large-scale redevelopment, it’s logistically difficult. In my neighborhood, it’s pretty clear that you could replace a bunch of rowhouses with much taller apartment buildings, but actually assembling a bunch of rowhouses would be challenging. If a developer did make an offer to several adjacent homeowners to buy them out, then more or less by definition they’d be better off with the cash — nobody is snatching the homes out from under them.

But beyond that, in terms of the overall value of the detached single-family home as a thing, I think its proponents should have a little more self-confidence.

I’ve got a six-year-old, which is exactly the time people tell me it’s most important to have a big yard. Personally, I feel fine without one. But if it really is important to most people (which seems perfectly plausible) then most people with kids will go buy houses with yards. There’s no mandate to sign little kids up for weekend soccer teams, but everyone does it (myself included) because I guess that’s what you do. And this is the beauty of freedom. The reason to mandate things is when you have reason to fear that people won’t want to go do them on their own.

So I think we need stricter air pollution regulations because it’s convenient for companies to do a lot of pollution and we need to stop them. But if detached houses are popular, they don’t need to be mandatory.

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