There’s some stuff here already about “upzoning”, or doing away with zoning laws which exclusively cordon off areas for single-family housing, and here’s another one because I am fascinated by the important racial arguments.
(While this post has been sitting in drafts, delayed mostly by the “cementshake” nonsense, Oregon managed to pass its own major, statewide upzoning law.)
In Minneapolis, much of the opposition has come from residents who already own single- family homes. A related factor, springing from the debate over income and density, has been race and the role that single-family housing plays in keeping housing segregated.
A 2016 study from the Metropolitan Council, a planning agency for the Twin Cities region, found that white households were three times more likely than black households to own a home. Even when controlling for age, immigration profile, English skills, gender balance, migration pattern, disability status and level of education, white families were more than 50 percent more likely to own homes than black families.
By easing zoning restrictions to create smaller, more affordable housing units throughout the city, Minneapolis leaders hope to ease that gap. Proponents also argue that having duplexes and triplexes mixed in with single-family homes will increase both income diversity and racial diversity within city neighborhoods.
What’s interesting to me about the racial disparities which exist through single-family zoning is that I wonder if there’s been any pushback from black families who have achieved enough financial success to own their own home in an area zoned for single-family homes, or those for whom home ownership is a goal being pursued?
By which I mean, I find myself wondering about how owning a home is one of the few ways anyone other than a rich person can build any personal wealth that then might get passed down through the family, and I admit that even as I support upzoning I find it interesting that this movement actually happens during a time when, as low as black home ownership might be as compared to white home ownership, more black people own homes than ever before. Suddenly, along comes upzoning, which might further restrict opportunities for black families to become home owners.
It’s possible this isn’t, on balance, an issue, and that even from the racial perspective upzoning is the way to go.
I just find it interesting that I keep reading these articles about the upzoning movement as a way to deal with the housing crisis and as much as they all tend to get into the issues of racial equality quoted above, they don’t seem also to examine what effects upzoning might have on issues of racial equity when it comes to home ownership.
Really, what I’m wondering, and what I’d like someone to look at, is this: will upzoning just lock-in the current racial disparities in home ownership by creating no new opportunities to own single-family dwellings for black people whose incomes become capable of purchasing a home, thereby creating neighborhoods where white families live in houses and black families live in duplexes, triplexes, and mixed-use apartment buildings?
Granted, I am assuming here that all of these new duplexes, triplexes, and “cottage clusters” will be rental properties, not opportunities for ownership. I don’t know enough (anything, really) about the real estate industry to understand what types of housing, exactly, will be built by developers under upzoning.
Recently, I got into this a bit on Twitter, too, and rather than try to merge what I said there with what I’ve been putting together here, I’m just going to insert those remarks here.
My upzoning question: will this be rental housing or owned housing? I ask because people keep rightfully bringing up the racial inequity in home ownership, but if all these duplexes, triplexes, ADUs, and “cottage clusters” are rentals, it doesn’t address that.
In which case all you end up with is primarily white people with single-family dwellings they still own, intermingled with rental housing that might bring neighborhood racial diversity but not equity in ownership. So you end up limiting new single-family owned dwellings, re-confirming that kind of housing as being primarily a white thing, locking in existing home equity racial inequities.
What am I missing, that this isn’t how upzoning is going to go? Will these duplexes, triplexes, and “cottage clusters” include ownership opportunities? Otherwise, it’s like conveniently saying, “Never mind, that American Dream signifier of the house, yard, two-car garage was just for us, because now we need to build density.”
I’m just saying that it’s a bit weird that we establish this cultural signifier of the American Dream to include owning a house with a two-car garage and a yard and then when society is “at risk” (I’m calling out a potential societal attitude there, not expressing my own view) of more black families becoming capable of buying into that dream, we decide it isn’t a sustainable thing and limit the chances to achieve it.
Or is the idea behind upzoning to change fundamentally this aspect of the American Dream to no longer include that house with a garage and a yard for anyone, and to gradually, over time, phase out and redevelop even the single-family homes that already exist into multi-family housing?