A development in the Sugarhouse area of Salt Lake City is pictured on Monday, July 22, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
When Minneapolis, then Oregon, then other local and state governments began stripping away exclusive single-family-home zoning over the past five years to allow the construction of multifamily housing, many development advocates predicted the start of a pro-YIMBY revolution.
But the “yes-in-my-backyard” movement has stumbled even before it’s really gotten started.
In court challenges around the country, opponents have cited spikes in traffic, strains to infrastructure, displacement of low-income residents, hits on property values and changes to neighborhood character. Multifamily zoning advocates, however, counter that opponents are resisting changes that will yield broader societal benefits.
The debates are challenging elected leaders, planning specialists, homebuilders and advocates, pitting long-established homeowners against a system desperate to get a handle on the nation’s growing crisis of housing affordability and homelessness.
“People want to maintain their neighborhood character, but it should be about ensuring quality of life for everyone,” said Natali Fani-Gonzalez, a Democratic member of the Montgomery County Council in Maryland who has endorsed changes to zoning laws. “You’re part of a community … you don’t own it. We need to evolve with society.”
‘I dread the possibility’
The most recent ruling arrived this month, when the Montana Supreme Court issued a decision paving the way for a pair of state laws to take effect over the objections of homeowners.
In 2023, Montana lawmakers were lauded for a bipartisan effort dubbed the “Montana Miracle,” a collection of measures that overrode local zoning ordinances to encourage more multifamily homes and accessory dwelling units, or ADUs — smaller secondary cottages or in-law apartments within or on a lot of a single-family home. The laws, championed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, were supposed to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024.
But in December, a consortium of single-family homeowners from across the state called Montanans Against Irresponsible Densification, or MAID, filed a complaint. The group argued that the state had unconstitutionally taken away homeowners’ property rights and would wrest local control from cities and counties. The lawsuit warned, in part, that the laws meant new construction could begin down the block without notice.
“I dread the possibility of waking up one morning and finding that one of my neighbors has sold her property to a developer who is then erecting a multi-unit building or a duplex, or an accessory dwelling unit right next to our nice and carefully maintained single-family dwelling,” wrote Glenn Monahan, a Bozeman resident and managing partner of MAID, in an affidavit filed with the initial lawsuit and quoted in the court’s ruling.
“If such development aimed at increasing density in my neighborhood happens, I believe it will seriously and adversely affect the economic value of my property,” Monahan wrote. “More important than economic value is the moral, aesthetic neighborhood values that my wife and I share with the neighbors …”
Representatives for MAID did not return calls for comment.
Wealthier and whiter
Berkeley, California, first established a residential zone exclusively for single-family homes in 1916 — just as racist covenants banning home sales to non-whites were gaining steam nationally and other workarounds to preserve neighborhood segregation were being tested.
Today, around 75% of residential land in the United States is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. These neighborhoods are typically wealthier and whiter, according to a 2023 research report by the Urban Institute.
Minneapolis is credited as the first major U.S. city to enact substantial changes to increase density when it abolished single-family-only zoning citywide in 2019, allowing up to three dwelling units on any residential lot.
People want to maintain their neighborhood character, but it should be about ensuring quality of life for everyone.
– Natali Fani-Gonzalez, a Democratic member of the Montgomery County Council in Maryland
That same year, the Oregon legislature passed a law with two so-called upzoning provisions: allowing duplexes in single-family zoning areas of cities with at least 10,000 residents, and allowing townhouses, triplexes and fourplexes in cities of at least 25,000 residents.
Upzoning encompasses a range of policy tools — such as building more “missing middle” housing in the range between single-family homes and apartment buildings, focusing on transit-oriented development, lifting parking requirements, and increasing floor-to-area ratios. But researchers and planners told Stateline that it can take years for these policy changes to address current housing needs or undo the harms of restrictive zoning.
“The largest challenge is that zoning reform takes a really long time to implement. From the start of reform to actually seeing effects, it takes about 10 years,” said Stephen Menendian, assistant director and director of research at the University of California, Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute.
“Even the Minneapolis reforms, which happened at warp speed, will take another four years to fully assess the effects,” Menendian said. “It’s been less a revolution and more of a slow shift.”
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UC Berkeley’s Zoning Reform Tracker, last updated in November, provides an overview of municipal zoning reform efforts across the U.S., documenting 148 initiatives in 101 municipalities over a span of 17 years.
Other local governments have passed ordinances taking aim at single-family-only zoning in various ways, including Austin, Texas; the city of Alexandria and Arlington County in Virginia; Sacramento, California; and Portland, Oregon. Many have been challenged in court.
In Minneapolis, the 2040 plan, as the city’s long-term planning blueprint is known, was held up after its passage in 2019 by years of environmental lawsuits and back-and-forth rulings, delaying implementation.
Finally, state lawmakers in May passed a bill exempting comprehensive housing plans from environmental review, a measure aimed squarely at preserving the 2040 plan.
Even then, a county judge issued an injunction, forcing the city to halt parts of the plan and revise it.
Talking it out
Diana Drogaris, outreach coordinator for the National Zoning Atlas, a research organization that works to demystify zoning laws across the U.S., thinks city leaders are improving their communication with residents during public hearings and input sessions. However, she notes that leaders must balance transparency with managing valid fears of zoning changes.
“A zoning change is going to have an effect on the public. It will affect the store they go to, their commutes, what type of resources are available,” Drogaris said. “And I think community leaders are getting better at having these conversations.
“The public doesn’t need to know every nook and cranny of these outdated codes,” she said, “but enough to understand how that one zoning change is going to change how that land is being used in their community.”
Menendian argues that misconceptions on both sides — among housing advocates and concerned community members — fuel much of the anger. “There’s a lot of misnomers about zoning reform,” he said.
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Homeowner groups also are expected to challenge a recent series of upzoning changes in Austin, approved at the end of 2023 and this spring. In 2022, a group of citizens successfully sued the city over a handful of ordinances designed to streamline housing development.
When a lawsuit is filed, work toward new housing developments may stop. California enacted a law in 2021 allowing property owners to split their lots and build two new homes in certain cities. In April, a Los Angeles judge ruled the law unconstitutional. In June, the state filed its notice of appeal.
Meanwhile, in Northern Virginia just outside the District of Columbia, the city of Alexandria and Arlington County, which also passed zoning changes last year, are facing their own legal challenges. The full impact of Alexandria’s zoning overhaul — even if it clears its legal challenges — may not do much to affect housing outcomes. According to the city manager’s estimates, allowing up to four units in zones that are currently limited to single-family dwellings would only create a net new 178 units over 10 years.
‘Absolutely … some sort of backlash’
This fall, both Montgomery County, Maryland, and Berkeley, California, will be considering upzoning proposals, following a summer filled with contentious public hearings.
Fani-Gonzalez, the Montgomery County councilmember, said that modernizing the county’s zoning, in conjunction with other policies such as rent stabilization, will help keep residents in their homes while creating new housing to accommodate the growth associated with being just outside Washington, D.C.
“We need more housing, but we cannot get stuck with building cookie-cutter houses that only certain folks can actually afford,” said Fani-Gonzalez.
In California, the city of Berkeley’s proposal to end exclusionary zoning in its neighborhoods is part of a broader effort to undo its racist legacy. The Berkeley City Council took its first steps in examining that legacy by denouncing the racist history of single-family zoning in 2021, a largely ceremonial move that gained steam when the city council asked the city for a report on missing-middle housing.
The city’s latest upzoning plan was scaled back this summer after a five-hour public hearing.
Lori Droste, a Berkeley councilmember from 2014 to 2022, told Stateline that she had been advocating for major upzoning changes since 2016 but struggled to get the votes. What changed, she said, was linking the need for zoning changes to the national consciousness raised by 2020 protests around systemic racism and racial injustice.
“Zoning reform is going to take time. It’s probably going to take 20 years before anyone notices real changes. But if we don’t start now, the housing crisis will only get worse,” she said.
When asked by Stateline if she expects any legal action if the upzoning proposal is successful, Droste responded, “I imagine there will be. I’m not in the city attorney’s office, but absolutely there’s going to be some sort of backlash.”
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.