I was on the StrongTowns Podcast | Transcript #1
Is Affordable Housing Possible Under Current Zoning Laws?
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PART 1: Media, the Purpose of Zoning, the Purpose of Zoning Reform
Here on the StrongTowns’ national podcast, I discuss my background, how cities are positioning themselves as national leaders in housing, and the transformative potentiality of incrementalism.
Abby Newsham, moderator:
I am Abby Newsham and you are listening to Upzoned. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned to show where we take a big story each week that touches the strong town's conversation, and we Upzone it, we talk about it in depth. I'm Abby, a planner at Multistudio in Kansas City, and today I'm joined by Aaron Lubeck, the development director at Southern Urbanism and a restoration contractor and builder. Aaron, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thanks
Aaron Lubeck:
For having me. I love the podcast and I'm thrilled to be invited.
Abby Newsham, moderator:
I was thinking about how to introduce you and I feel like you have many different hats and titles, so I hope I got the most important ones.
Aaron Lubeck:
You did. Yeah. At the end of the day, my main skill is as a designer and builder, and I've been near downtown Durham for about 20 years. I ran a restoration contracting company that did pretty much exclusively historic restoration projects for 10 years and shifted over the last 10 years as I've gotten more engaged with the new urbanist movement towards new urban infill land planning and design. And that's allowed me to write a book called Green Restorations, teach at Duke University’s Nicholas School for the Environment, and start Southern Urbanism, designed to curate these conversations even further.
Abby Newsham, moderator:
And this year at CNU, you had the second edition of Southern Urbanism Quarterly Journal that you were able to share with folks.
Aaron Lubeck:
We did, yeah. So Southern Urbanism is a nonprofit media company that started for a lot of reasons. The model was based largely on the Sightlines Institute, which is a really admirable 30-year-old group out of Seattle that is curating all of the big conversations on fixing our cities and making a more equitable & sustainable region in the Pacific Northwest.
And when we looked at the South. The rest of the world doesn't want to admit it, but it's now the country's most populated region with 140 million people, and it has nothing like Sightlines.
There's not a place where people who are trying to do better, who want to build better, who are frustrated with the way we're building cities, can discuss those conversations, not only broadly, but with people who are actually doing the work.
And so we've been really focused on voicing the practitioner who, as you know, is a voice that's largely suppressed in public discourse. For people who are looking for the true stories of what works and what doesn't work, from the people who are doing it, our goal has been to curate those thoughts. We've been really proud of the two magazines we've put out and the relationships we've developed with universities, young talent, leaders in industry, and CNU, and we are looking forward to continuing the work.
Abby Newsham, moderator:
Yeah, it's incredibly high-quality content based on what I saw when you had the copy at CNU, and it sounds like it's definitely needed because the South is one of those areas of the country that just has some of the best urbanism and some of the worst urbanism in different places. So it's great that you've developed that, and there are many opportunities for incremental development and reviving towns and cities now that the population has boomed so much. At the same time, there's a lot of major investment and boom going on in some of your larger cities. So it's a really interesting region and you have great weather, which I'm very jealous about. That's kind of my thing, I hate the cold.
Aaron Lubeck:
Well, when people come here, they don't tend to go back. I mean, the South is the world's biggest sprawl repair exercise. And I believe it's the last region of the developed world to urbanize. Many of our cities, like Durham, were kind of not urban until 20 years ago. They had a core that was 100 years old that kind of existed mostly as a trading ground for the tobacco industry that existed largely for a month or two a year, and because we were mostly agrarian & rural.
So it’s very new, that we're urbanizing now. And it's really fascinating because the analogy I use is America's most iconic urbanism, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, was built all before zoning. And that's relevant. The West Coast cities were built after zoning, but pre-environmental movements, without things like stormwater and open space and tree saves, and there's definitely a place where there's no question about that. But the South is being built after both of those regulatory realities.
And it's not to say that there's not a place for each of them, but the analogy that I would use is if New York were built today, just to park the office space of Midtown Manhattan would require all of Manhattan (22 square miles). And everything north of Chelsea would be so encumbered by stream buffers that it would be almost unbuildable.
So it's just the reality that we're existing in. It's not necessarily wrong. This is a very different set of encumbrances to build the South than Kansas City, Chicago, New York, or San Francisco had.
Abby Newsham, moderator:
Yeah, yeah. We're in a very different time and planning movement. It'll be fascinating to see how that kind of layers on what was existing in the South as we see outcomes 20 years from now.
So the article that we're covering is actually about the South. This was published in Indy Week as an op-ed by Bob Chapman. And it is entitled, “The Purpose of Zoning is to Prevent Affordable Housing”. So it's basically a proclamation of support for what's called the SCAD text amendments being proposed in Durham. North Carolina. SCAD stands for “Simplifying Codes for Affordable Development”.
These tactical changes to the current development code focus on small-scale changes that will allow small-lot housing, neighborhood retail, mixed-use development, and missing middle housing types.
The author talks about the history of zoning and how changes in the world, like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and the passing of the Fair Housing Act, brought on new and more pervasive methods of housing discrimination nestled within our zoning codes, which most people don't read on a daily basis.
So regulatory changes like downzoning have enabled racial and class segregation and that has persisted for generations across the United States. Rules like density maximums, parking mandates, and complex permitting regulations have been hindering the ability of the Black community's traditional urban neighborhoods to rebuild themselves.
The SCAD amendments are now basically the center of intense local and even beyond-local debate. Aaron Lubeck, who has been intimately involved in the process of developing these recommendations and is a major proponent of the amendments, has agreed to dig into these a little bit with me. So Aaron, I really appreciate that. Did I leave anything out? Can you tell me more about what kind of initiated this effort?
Aaron Lubeck:
Sure. It's a lot of stuff to go through there, but I think some of this is rooted in the long-running frustrations that cities are just not equitable places to build.
Every stack of rules is designed to favor people with money and discourage or even eliminate people with less wealth. And in most cities, you look at in America, particularly the more progressive ones, it correlates with this thesis: on any project, there are probably five reasons you can't do it. So the reality is that when you're talking about entitlement, you need all the switches to be up, or you can't do it. So you could fix four of the five problems and you still can't do it, right?
Those problems are typical, and Eric Kronberg is so good at identifying them because 80% of them are the same in every city.
It's parking mandates which will be ruinous for walkable urbanism.
It's density standards, which were really used in a racist way in Durham in the late 1960s.
It's lot dimensional standards.
It's single-family zoning, and
usually proceduralism as well.
So if you start with those five, you realize that none of these are actually necessarily that technically difficult to fix. Anyone can go through your code and recognize what these are.
And Durham actually did an extraordinary job fixing a couple of these in 2019. Under the direction of then-mayor Steve Schewel (who has a long history of activism and actually started the Independent paper that you just mentioned back in the 1980s), the council eliminated single-family zoning.
Durham may have been the first city in the South to do that, if not, it's obviously one of the first ones in the country.
The city also implemented a really innovative small lot code, which I write about in Southern Urbanism's Summer issue, that frankly, other cities should be duplicating.
Durham is absolutely booming. In the middle of a pandemic, we've had Google, Apple, and Facebook offices announced in a town of just 250,000 people. So people are coming here. And with really tight housing markets, we need to build.
The small lot code introduced 2000 square foot lots, down from a sort of Southern standard of 5,000 square foot minimum (and 7500 square foot norm), but contingent on those homes being 1200 square feet or smaller.
We knew that would have some interest, and actually, in just three years now, the majority of the detached housing built in urban Durham are small lots. It changed that quickly.
The standards for Durham’s innovative “Small Lot Code” implemented in 2019
Builders have had to relearn, and designers too, for that matter, had to relearn how to design and build homes at this scale because nobody's done it for a generation, maybe two generations.
It's been interesting to see that learning process. There are definitely some that are not gorgeous. There are some that really are gorgeous. And it's exactly like markets are supposed to work: the good ones will get duplicated, and the bad ones won't. That’s how markets work. They learn. Products get better over time.
SCAD came out of partial learnings from 2019’s Expanding Housing Choices. With any reform, as you know, Abby, urbanism is messy.
There's no right answer. As housing oppositional folks will always say, “we need to get this right”. But there is no right answer. It's messy.
There are gradients, and there are trade-offs, and so forth. And so with Expanding Housing Choices, there were learnings, there were some things that worked and some things that didn't. And so this started mainly as a need to clean up things that weren't working. That was combined with the reality, that we have an ever-dwindling body of those building affordable housing in Durham. Many really want to build affordable housing. We sought to understand the problems that those builders were running into.
So this started as an inquiry with our small practitioners. It's a really good, really talented, well-meaning group that wants to do good things in Durham. And you just ask them three questions:
1. What's preventing you from building more housing?
2. What's preventing you from building better housing?
3. What's preventing you from building more affordable housing?
Then you shut up and listen. This is really what planning should be, it's these interviews of people on the front lines who know this information because they suffer it, right?
You start to hear the same answers. And that was aggregated and brought to staff and had a pretty overwhelming buy-in. Not exclusively, of course, but we have really good planning staff here, who definitely offered detailed questions and a critical review of everything. But in general, the vast majority of these reforms are uncontroversial, technical cleanup, fixing silly things, and those are pretty easy to get buy-in from the city.
Abby Newsham, moderator:
So where do you think the major pushback is coming from? Is it because, I mean, I'm guessing there are so many different little changes? I mean, it is really a technical kind of surgical amendment. I'm guessing without knowing in detail that there's probably a handful of primary issues that people are clamoring to.
Aaron Lubeck:
Sure. I would say even outside of the issues, as this amendment's process has gone on to 18 months, it's less about issues and more about people. Every application has the same five people who show up and protest everything.
Alex Baca over at Greater Greater Washington refers to them as “recreationally-anti”: some people play tennis for fun and other people show up and protest policy.
We certainly have that group. It's interesting because as the YIMBY movement has accelerated, the anti-housing groups that have dominated public discourse have lost power.
You realize that it's not even necessarily about having a duplex in their neighborhood. It's kind of about control and about the control that these groups have had over public discourse for decades.
And as they see that grip loosening, they become pretty nasty. And so I actually think their objections have less to do with the amendment and more to do with the fact that they're used to controlling everything, and now they're kind of not. It’s an issue of entitlement. And that's a national problem.
There are a few technical things that we think are more transformative in the amendment, and I don't even think they're necessarily controversial, but they potentially could do really good things in Durham.
One eliminates parking mandates completely. Technically, staff wanted to keep it to maximums, so they can tell them no if Walmart comes to town and wants to do 1000 spaces. And we were fine with that. Durham would be the seventh-largest municipality in the country to repeal mandates, following Richmond and Raleigh, who did it just recently.
This introduces faith-based housing back to the marketplace, which is a whole thing to get into, but a remarkably dead market because it's been banned for so long. Technocratic zoning and monolithic single-use zoning basically zoned church housing out of existence. A church in the South usually has tons of land- most have acres of unused land- but their ability to build a village or supportive housing for themselves or for affordable housing or seniors or refugees or anybody was eliminated. It was zoned out of existence. So those rights are restored.
The re-establishes an ability to build neighborhood commercial. And to be clear on this, this is not a coffee shop in the middle of your exclusively residential neighborhood, which Raleigh tried to do not too long ago.
This is more like Portland, which has all these tremendous mixed-use neighborhood commercial districts. You're never more than four blocks from a little corner thing that has a restaurant, a bar, and some retail. Those were also zoned out of existence in Durham for the last 50 years. And so those are reestablished too.
And then it features some really innovative work with reestablishing the rights and ability of local practitioners to build affordable housing. This wasn't necessarily zoned out of existence but has been functionally eliminated as the affordable housing markets went from primarily privately produced, as they were up to 20 years ago for kind of all of humanity's existence, to the public domain where they exist exclusively today.
Durham has great builders here, like Topher Thomas, a young immigrant builder, whom we wrote about in the first Southern Urbanism issue. he is a teacher-turned-small-home-builder who wants to do nothing but affordable housing. But he's sort of hamstrung at every step of the way. And this allows paths to build more small-scale, incremental affordability at the scale citizens like Topher operate at.
Those are the big things that are transformative. And mostly for the people who dig into it, sincerely love Durham, and are genuinely curious about making Durham better, I think we found overwhelming support. The few people who object to it are the usual people who object to everything and the people who they get to.
part 2 to follow…