American Zoning as an Expression of Nativism

It's possible to advance many explanations for the rise of zoning in the United States in the 1920s: classism, resurgent racism, reaction to rising vehicular traffic, the failure of restrictive covenants and many more.  While all of these reasons, among others, have some explanatory power, for me they fail to adequately account for the unique and distinguishing features of American zoning as described by author Sonia Hirt, namely, the establishment of exclusively residential zones as well as the creation of single-family detached zones.

A possible alternative explanation is that these specific features were motivated by and in reaction to many of the same conditions that gave rise to the immigration restriction movement which came to prominence at nearly the exact same time.  For example, the village of Euclid's zoning ordinance, which led to the Supreme Court case of the same name, was adopted in November 1922, slightly more than a year after the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was enacted.  Restrictionist currents were running very strongly throughout the nation at the very time that cities busied themselves passing zoning laws.

Now, one fact that may surprise is that immigrants at the turn of the century actually had higher homeownership rates than the native population.  This chart, compiled by economist Richard Sutch in a recent paper, depicts homeownership by city size in 1900 among the native-born and foreign-born, showing that the foreign-born had substantially higher homeownership in virtually all cities and city sizes apart from New York (the entry point for many immigrants), where the difference was nonetheless small:

How, or why, did the foreign-born achieve relatively high rates of ownership? Sutch speculates that immigrants valued property ownership due to "the importance of acquiring a life-cycle stock of wealth because of an inability to rely upon distant family members, the larger community, or co-ethnic neighbors for protection in old age."  Contrarily, in From Cottage to Bungalow, Joseph Bigott writes about ethnic savings and loan entities in turn-of-the-century Chicago and how these offered greater financial flexibility, in some sense, to new immigrants.

What seems to be generally agreed on is that immigrants, more so than natives, embraced small multifamily dwellings and home commercial uses, whether as simple as a chicken coop in the backyard or as elaborate as an entire storefront added onto a single-family home.  Jacob Wegmann, writing in What Happened to the Three Decker, quotes a developer as noting that the small multifamily dwelling provides "a way for working class folks with no established assets to obtain an owner-occupied residence." Additionally, he writes:

"[I]mmigrant families, many of them already the owners of small businesses, were likelier to be undaunted by the extra risks and work posed by being small landlords, such as the need to build up cash reserves to cover loan payments in the event of vacancy of the rental apartment. Additionally, partially due to Chicago’s characteristic clustering by nationality, many immigrant families have an extensive network of acquaintances from the same ethnic group to draw upon as a pool of potential tenants, and for whom credit and character checks can be undertaken in a verbal, informal manner via social contacts."

The small business and the multifamily dwelling were, in that sense, the gateway to prosperity for many immigrants, as well as a gateway to homeownership, around 1900 and continuing even today.  Given that reality, I think the observer of history should find it very odd how central a position American zoning gave to the exclusion of commercial uses from residential areas and the banning of multifamily uses from large areas of entire cities, particularly when other countries not so well-known for their elevation of so-called property rights embraced neighborhood commercial as a desirable and positive social good. 

Small SF and multifamily housing with added restaurant/retail, Port Chester, NY.

I do not know what the position of Edward Murray Bassett, the father of American zoning, was on immigration.  His autobiography is virtually impossible to obtain.  His writings available online do not directly mention it.  I would perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt.  The motives of many of his contemporaries, however, are not in doubt, as Seymour Toll wrote in 1969 in Zoned American:  

"The [laundry] controls were an expression of the hatred and antipathy which San Franciscans were directing against the Chinese, trying to force them to quit the city. The immigrant is in the fiber of zoning.  He first appeared as an Oriental.  In early twentieth-century New York he is seen as a southeastern European, the lower East Side garment worker who presence in midtown Manhattan created one of the decisive moments in the history of zoning."

None of this is terribly new or controversial.  A connection that hasn't been made as clearly is how single-family zoning and the total exclusion of commercial uses were specifically targeted at the immigrant businesses and housing options described above.  A newly-arrived immigrant (and most people in general) did not have the capital to construct an entire "mixed use" building.  After some time, though, he might be able to add a very small commercial addition onto an existing building, as shown in the photo above, or convert the first floor into a storefront.  Zoning would forbid this development in two ways: first, by instituting setbacks, and secondly by eliminating commercial uses altogether.  Even native residents needed commercial uses in close proximity, but these were to be relegated to special corridors where competition would be greater and immigrants would have more difficulty gaining a toehold.  

With respect to residential buildings, the banning of small multifamily buildings from much of the city foreclosed the route to homeownership previously mentioned.  A century after New York's zoning code was adopted, the numbers have flipped, and the native born are much more likely to be homeowners than the foreign born (67% to 52%, according to the Census).  The financial benefits of homeownership, moreover, have been concentrated in the hands of the upper middle class, the original backers of zoning.

It is only antipathy to immigrant populations that I think can explain these dual features of almost all American zoning codes, and their absence from the codes of most other countries.  The apparent trauma of early 20th century immigration led Americans, or at least a vocal portion of them, to shred their traditional respect for individual property rights and institute special zones which reflected native middle-class values and conceptions of proper living conditions.  The loss of neighborhood shops, or affordable rentals, were unfortunate but necessary casualties of this process.  Elsewhere in the world, the process of commercial conversion can still be watched unfolding, as below in Mexico.

Shopfront in setback, contemporary Guadalajara suburbs, Mexico.

I am not certain, though, that the alliance against shops and multifamily dwellings was ever as unified as it was made out to be.  Then, as now, the loudest and shrillest voices probably carried the day.  Many natives would have liked to have run businesses out of their homes as well, although the importance of multifamily housing a means to ownership waned with the arrival of new forms of mortgage finance in the 1920s and especially 1930s.  

While times have changed, the rolling back the restrictive laws of the 1920s would pay dividends even today.  

Related posts: 

• Where Zoning Went Wrong
• Single-Family Zoning in Seattle and the Limited Logic of Euclid

Homeownership Postscript: An Even Grimmer Appraisal

In a recent post, I pointed out how, when adjusted for age and life expectancy, homeownership in the United States is lower than is has been for many decades.  In the comments, it was further pointed out that not only is homeownership itself lower, but that free and clear ownership has been on the decline as well.

There is some data available here, enough to put together a chart over time first using the non-adjusted homeownership rates (blue is homeownership, red is the percentage of all homes that are owned without a mortgage):

As can be seen, there has been a dramatic change over time, with over a majority of owned homes being owned free and clear in the 1920s and 1940s, and thereafter steadily declining to the present figure of just under 30 percent.  The increase in the 1940s may be related to the effects of wartime rent control and the shift in cash investing to real estate during those years.

Today, the majority of these non-mortgage encumbered homes appear to be owned by senior citizens who have paid off their 30-year mortgages.  In light of this, and the growth of the over-65 demographic since the 1940s, it should be somewhat surprising that this statistic has declined.

Here is the same analysis using my age-adjusted homeownership figures (1920 is omitted):

In addition to the above, of the majority of homes that are encumbered with mortgages of all types, the percent of equity in those homes has been steadily falling as well, as shown on the below chart:

The chart speaks for itself, with a decline in the 1950s and 1960s likely related to a growing use of the 30-year mortgage with its lower down payment requirements, a stabilization through the early 1980s, and a precipitous decline during the cresting and burst of the housing bubble in the late 2000s.

The implied conclusion here, that a dramatic expansion of debt has been necessary just to maintain the illusion of a stable homeownership rate (setting aside the explosion of debt in the 2000s necessary to support an increase in homeownership), puts an even more negative spin on the figures from the preceding post.  In short, a decline in homeownership has until the past few years been masked by shifting demographics and an increase in household debt.

One last point here is that although homeownership fell back to its earlier baseline (in non-adjusted figures) following the real estate bubble, equity has not risen back to to the prior 60-70% range, even in spite of the many institutional cash buyers on the market.  The debt legacy of the bubble appears as though it will be around for many years to come.

Related posts:

• "Affordable Housing," part II

Is the Decline in the Homeownership Rate Even Greater Than Thought?

One of the most heavily reported stories of the post-housing bubble economy has been the decline in the American homeownership rate, which has supposedly fallen to levels not seen since the days of the Lyndon Johnson administration.  Although ownership data is often broken down every which way, including regionally, across ethnic and income groups, over time, by immigration status and by age bracket, one analytical quirk I've noticed is that the non-age comparisons are rarely themselves controlled for by age.

This is highly significant, since homeownership is, obviously, heavily correlated with stage in life.  While only around 33% of 29-year-olds own homes, by age 39, this number leaps to around 49% (according to age bracket data from the 1990s to present).  This fact has major consequences for comparisons among nearly every demographic group, but even more so for comparisons over time.  How so?   Consider that a major age-related change since the 1940 Census has been an increase in the median age of around 10 years due to a decline in the birth rate and a substantial increase in life expectancy.

What is the significance of these changes for the homeownership rate?  The chart I prepared below uses averages of ownership by age bracket for 1994 and 2014 to estimate interval changes and make a complete graph showing that, in general, the rate increases until around age 66 (one would think related to post-retirement home sales) and then gradually tapers off thereafter, while still remaining well above the overall average.

As a result, the older a population grows, the higher its homeownership level should be, all else being equal.  Intuitively, it should be shocking that today's homeownership rate is comparable to that at the height of the baby boom era, when the national median age was only 28.  The Census Bureau has apparently made some adjustments to more recent ownership data to reflect changes in age structure, but I was interested in doing the same for the decennial data going back many decades.

The data has been adjusted to account for 1) changes in the median age, normalized to 2014, to reflect that an older population is centered around a much higher ownership level, and 2) changes in the life expectancy independent of median age, to reflect that the older people live, the higher the homeownership level is likely to be.  First is a plot of the non-adjusted decennial Census data (plus 2014), showing the familiar pattern of a large jump in the 1940s due in part to wartime rent controls, a slowdown in the 1960s, and a general stagnation since that time.

Once we account for the demographic changes, however, it becomes obvious how the aging of the population has masked a major decline since 1970.  The chart below shows the data adjusted for change in median ages only.  Note also how the slowdown in the 1960s has disappeared and been replaced by a substantial increase, as the population was growing younger during that time.  This is more consistent, I think, with the conventional wisdom that the 1960s were a boom time for new buyers as much as the 1950s were.

Finally, if we account for life expectancy as well, the trends are further amplified, showing that, in age-adjusted terms, today's homeownership rate is lower than that of 1940, which was itself a low point only a little above where it had been in the depths of the Depression.  A peak is reached around 1970, after which there was and continues to be a decline (the upward blip in the mid-2000s is not represented here).

My attempt at analysis here is definitely not the last word in examining this data, and no doubt there are flaws, but it at least leaves open the possibility that today's homeownership rate, in the context of age adjustments, is lower than it has been for a very long time, at least as long as 80 years and perhaps as far back as 120 years or more.  With more data on earlier Censuses and a more rigorous approach more refined and complete results could be calculated, but I would doubt whether the overall picture would be greatly different.

The question as to why homeownership peaked around 1970, in these charts, and declined thereafter, is one which has been discussed in many other and related contexts.  Nathan Lewis has written extensively about the abandonment of the gold standard.  Ben Ross has discussed the changes in land use policy in the 1970s, including the rise of environmentalism, which threw up new barriers to development and reduced the supply of new housing coming to market.  Seeking a full explanation would be far beyond the scope of this post, but I think it is noteworthy that the results are broadly consistent with other economic markers, including inflation-adjusted income.

Finally, it it may be interesting to compare these trends with those of Europe, as shown on this graph which I grabbed from Twitter (via Antony Slumbers):

Although the US continues to have a lower homeownership rate than the Eurozone, and far lower than many individual countries, I suspect this difference may disappear or even reverse once median ages are taken into account (the median age of the Eurozone being over 41).

Spreadsheet with data and charts here.

Related posts:

• Was the Rise of Car Ownership Responsible for the Midcentury Homeownership Boom in the US?
• Homeownership, Unemployment and Economic Growth: Looking at the Trends

Single Family Zoning: It's All About the Lot Sizes

Contemporary critiques of zoning take several forms.  First, and probably most common, is the critique of strict use segregation in the Euclidean manner, with commercial and residential areas segregated to greater or lesser degrees.  An increasing focus has lately been placed on the relative preponderance of single-family detached residential zoning within urbanized areas.  A third line of critique, which has received somewhat less attention although it has been the subject of numerous academic studies over the years, looks at minimum lot size requirements within both single-family and multifamily zones.

Although it may seem like a minor subject next to the first two critiques mentioned, the second critique is incomplete without examining permitted lot sizes.  For instance, even though a city may have substantial areas set aside for multifamily housing, if the minimum lot size per apartment unit (or floor area ratio equivalent) is approximately equivalent to single-family zones, the density and/or affordability difference may be minimal.  Alternatively, the single-family detached ("SFD") zoning designation, by itself, tells us little about the density of the area.  Depending on the lot area required and right-of-way widths, SFD densities for a given household size can range from 300/square mile to as much as 25,000/square mile or more, all without the need for any party walls.  

A few concrete examples can help illustrate the point.  In the American context, despite the presumed consumer preference for SFD homes, neighborhoods of homes on very small lots and using narrow rights-of-way, such as are abundant in many other countries, are quite rare.  In the entire New York metropolitan area, for instance, there are only a handful of such neighborhoods, mostly those intended as beachside retreats along the southern shore of Brooklyn and on the Rockaway Peninsula.  One such neighborhood is shown here:

This is Gerritsen Beach, in Brooklyn, showing parcels of 1,800 square feet on a right-of-way (property line to property line) of 28'.  The 2010 Census gives a population density of over 17,000/square mile, about half of the average for Brooklyn, although this may be affected by the presence of second homes.  As Nathan Lewis has shown, similarly scaled neighborhoods in Tokyo attain densities exceeding 30,000/square mile.  Even so, it is about 80% denser than the densest SFD suburbs built in Nassau County during the 1940s-1970s.  It is more than twice as dense as Levittown itself, and denser even than the three-decker neighborhoods of cities like Worcester, MA or New Haven, CT.  The New York metro area has a conspicuous absence of neighborhoods of this density and type, with Census tracts swiftly falling off from around 25,000/square mile to 10,000/square mile.

Beach neighborhoods seem to be popular settings for this type of design, as a similar (but slightly lower) density is present in Long Beach, California, shown below.  Lots are around 2,400 square feet with a 40' right of way and alleys of 13' (comparable density appears to be achieved through presence of small apartment buildings):  

And here is Levittown itself, with lot sizes of around 6,000 square feet and right-of-way (between outer sidewalk edges) of 50'.  Population density is approximately 7,500/sq. mi.:  

The Levittown homes in their initial form, intended for the large families of the Baby Boom era, were actually somewhat smaller (800 sq. ft.) than the 1920s vacation cottages of Gerritsen Beach (1,000 sq. ft.).  The contrast of very small houses with lots the same size or larger larger than those typical of the pre-1940 period seems to have been characteristic of the time period, perhaps related to the increased cost of labor following the Great Depression combined with stable land values.  The more spacious lots may have offered some compensation for the modest interiors.

At the extreme is the ultra-low density of interior but non-rural New England, showing 2- and 3-acre lot zoning (here, in Easton, Connecticut), accompanied by wetlands regulations, with population density of around 260/square mile:

Now, if a rapidly urbanizing country wished to offer the possibility of ownership of a SFD home to the greatest possible portion of its population, the obvious policy goal would be to allow construction of a SFD home on any size lot desired, and on streets as narrow as possible so as to minimize economic waste.  The result is very much what we see in most of the wards of Tokyo as well as in Gerritsen Beach: very small lots but with practical (square-shaped) dimensions along narrow streets and no alleys.  Where multifamily buildings are not prohibited, these will be interspersed here and there, sometimes occupying two or three lots.

In practice, however, American zoning does not take this approach, with the sole exception of mobile home parks (which I've discussed here).  Not only are lot sizes strictly regulated for SFD zones, generally to standards far in excess of what is needed for a comfortably-sized home, other policy measures are in place that make small lots difficult to build as a matter of economics, such as:

• Apparent aesthetic preference for large, widely space multifamily over densely packed single-family in multifamily zones.  Although small multifamily buildings have fallen out of zoning fashion, if they were ever popular, those zones that survive have some curious features.  For instance, one Connecticut town's code, typical of the type, effectively grants density bonuses for building duplexes and triplexes over building two or three standalone houses on the same lot.  In the densest zone it is possible to build a single-family home on 5,000 sq. ft. -- the smallest SFD lot permitted in any zone -- but a duplex requires only 7,500 sq. ft. and a triplex only 9,000.  The policy intent here is not obvious, but implies aesthetic favoritism for retaining large dwellings with generous spacing even at the expense of the single-family ideal.  
• Minimum street widths.  Although these do not affect the lot size directly, mandated wide streets make small lots for SFD a less economical proposition.  For instance, were the Gerritsen Beach lots placed along the Levittown right-of-way, each 1800 sq. ft. lot would look out onto 3,000 sq. ft. of sidewalk and roadway!  The neighborhood, overall, would have a ratio of 1.2:1 of private land to right-of-way, or, in other words, only 55% of the land would be in private lots for sale.  Levittown's ratio is a far better 3:1.  With a 28' right-of-way, Gerritsen Beach's streets are already about as wide as economically possible in light of high land values, and streets of Japanese dimensions would yield a far better ratio.

The design differences produce some noticeable differences even at the very large scale.  The prefecture of Tokyo, with population 13.2 million, has a homeownership rate of 45%.  The city of New York, with population 8.4 million, has homeownership of 32%.  Although the prefecture's density is lower than New York's (16,000 vs. 28,000/sq. mi.), Tokyo's outer suburban areas are so much denser than New York's that its metropolitan area density is higher.  For the entire metro area, Tokyo maintains a 56% homeownership rate with 47% share of detached houses, as compared to New York with 52% homeownership and 36% SFD share.  Los Angeles, to pick another example, has 49% homeownership with 50% SFD stock.

A metro area of more comparable size to New York's, such as Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe, has a homeownership rate of 58%, higher than the entire state of New York, and not much lower than far smaller American cities commonly associated with low-density SFD housing such as the Houston MSA (60%), Dallas (61%), Atlanta (63%) and Phoenix (63%).

Interestingly, the issue of minimum lot sizes appears to be one on which there is general agreement between the Smart Growth faction and the defenders of suburbia, as Wendell Cox wrote some years ago in response to critique from the Brookings Institute:

"I was even more surprised at the claim that I defend 'anti-density zoning and other forms of large lot protectionism.' Not so. 

Indeed, I agree with [Jonathan] Rothwell on the problems with large lot zoning. However, it is a stretch to suggest, as he does, that the prevalence of detached housing results from large lot zoning. This is particularly true in places like Southern California where lots have historically been small and whose overall density is far higher than that of greater New York, Boston, Seattle and double that of the planning mecca of Portland."

I think that Cox is correct here, but not even as correct as he could be.  Large-lot zoning not only does not cause a prevalence of SFD housing, it limits it, as shown in the New York metro area.  Los Angeles' metropolitan density is substantially higher than New York's (a point often raised to incredulous reaction), but its share of SFD stock is much higher.  To point out in response to an allegation that a city is heavily zoned for SFD that a majority of its housing units are in multifamily structures (in the case of Seattle, at the link) only underscores the point.

Although most studies have found that minimum lot sizes do affect overall development density (that is, developers appear to build at or near the minimum lot size allowed), one study of Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. found that, except in the case of areas with very large minimum lots sizes, developers were subdividing into lots larger than the mandated minimum, including in cases where planned unit development options left them with a free hand to build denser than the zoning code superficially allowed:

"We then examine the extent to which lot size is being constrained by regulation by comparing actual subdivision density to the allowable density under zoning rules. This analysis is done for three counties with different degrees of suburbanization. We find that only in the areas with the very large lot zoning does zoning seem to be constraining actual lot[] size. There is a good deal of excess capacity in the density that could be built, especially in the more densely zoned areas." Lot Size, Zoning, and Household Preferences:Impediments to Smart Growth?

There might be no concern with low-density development at the fringes of metro areas except that such areas, once built up, are politically almost impervious to change.  Some cities have implemented maximum lot sizes, but these are generally very generous and only apply in certain areas.  The misunderstood achievement of the New Urbanism, and the Maryland suburb of Kentlands in particular -- whatever its faults in design detail -- was that small lot single-family housing developments not only need not be qualitatively inferior to the 6,000+ sq. ft. tracts that characterized the post-1940 suburban era, and that they could even offer amenities that made them superior residential environments.  Where regulatory mandates fail, leading by example can succeed.

Kentlands, with SFD lots from 5,600 to 2,600 sq. ft, and with ROWs ranging
from 45 ft. to 12 ft. on alleys.

Related posts: None of mine, but Nathan has written several great pieces on the topic which you can find at his website.

Auto Costs and Housing Costs, or, One Reason the Suburbs are So Appealing

Simon Vallee has a post from some time back about filtering vs. gentrification in which he analogizes the process of gentrification, in North America, to the car market in Cuba, noting that restrictions on supply will tend to boost prices and limit availability of a desired good.  Although the comparison is intended to be illustrative, I think it also highlights a substantive difference which, in effect, subsidizes automobiles at the expense of housing.  First, though, some background.

Going back for a moment to the subject matter of a Nathan Lewis post, we can note that, land costs aside, the sticker price of manufactured housing as compared to a new vehicle is not as different as one might think.  A two-bedroom manufactured home, for instance, of about the size of the average new home of the 1950s, costs only around $41,500 as compared to the price of a popular new sedan (I chose the Altima, one of the best-selling cars in the United States) at around $27,000:

However, when car costs are compared to overall home values, including site-built as well as manufactured homes, a different story emerges.  In 1940, the median home was valued at only 2.3 times the retail price of the average new car.  By 2010, in spite of the crash in home prices, this ratio had risen to 6.4.  Car operating costs have also generally fallen as fuel efficiency and vehicle reliability have improved.  Median rents, not shown here, have grown at an even faster rate than home values.

In short, over the last seven or so decades, car ownership (or leasing) has become dramatically less expensive relative to home ownership or tenancy.  Partly this must be due to labor-saving technologies that have affected car production more than homebuilding: even manufactured homes still require extensive human labor, which has become much costlier (though more productive) since 1940, whereas the formerly labor-intensive car assembly process has been heavily automated and accelerated.  The process of robotically assembling houses, or even apartment buildings, remains in its infancy.

Are long-term, over-inflation increases in home values also linked to increases in land values caused by general urban population increase and restrictive zoning?  It goes without saying that rural land values are lower than urban land values, and the Census homeownership figures show that housing values are lower, and homeownership higher, in more rural states in spite of lower incomes.  Relatively poor and rural West Virginia has the nation's highest homeownership rate, while 100% urbanized Washington D.C. has had its lowest in every Census since 1930.  As Luis Bettencourt writes:

"There are several important consequences for general land use in cities. First, the price of land rises faster with population size than average incomes. This is the result of per capita increases in both density and economic productivity, so that money spent per unit area and unit time, i.e. land rents, increases on average by 50% with every doubling of city population size! It is this rise in the price of land that mediates, indirectly, many of the spontaneous solutions that reduce per capita energy use and Carbon emissions in larger cities. Cars become expensive to park, and taller buildings become necessary to keep the price of floor space in pace with incomes, thus leading to smaller surface area to volume."   The Kind of Problem a City Is.

Urbanization in the era of the automobile in turn causes frictions which lead to pressure for zoning.  American municipal zoning, in its initial formulation and as is still practiced today, is fundamentally a device to politically manage these frictions by restricting the intensity of residential land use.  Though not its stated purpose, it has the effect of increasing land scarcity that is already inherent in the urbanization process, and thereby provides a positive feedback mechanism that puts additional pressure on housing values.

What does this all have to do with cars?  As noted above, the cost of a manufactured home, in isolation, is only slightly more than that of a typical sedan.  As urbanization increases, however, the increasing value of land makes cars, which do not have their land storage cost bundled into the sticker price (unlike Japan does, effectively), seem like a relative bargain.  Some time ago, Cap'n Transit wrote a fascinating series on how New York came to tolerate and eventually permit free overnight on-street parking in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  We would find it ludicrous if someone were to purchase a manufactured home and to drive it into Manhattan on a flatbed expecting the city to provide free land on which to site it, but that was how the story went with cars:

"This [middle-class] conception of the benefits of car ownership has always had a huge bait-and-switch component to it. In New York City in the 1940s it was no exception. When people looked at the price of a car, they didn't figure in $20-35 per month in garage rental. When they got their cars, many couldn't afford to pay and took their chances on the street. Garage owners now had to compete with free street parking and lowered their rates accordingly, which meant that they didn't have enough income to expand their facilities, and resorted to bribing the police. 

"These social-climbing drivers felt cheated, but they didn't take their anger out on the car dealers. No, they felt that the city owed them the free parking necessary to make their cars as affordable as they thought." The right to free parking in 1940s New York

There are therefore two clashing trends: as cities grow in size, the cost of a buying a car declines relative to increases in income and housing cost, yet the actual cost of storing a vehicle is, or should be, increasing rapidly, since cars, like houses, occupy a significant amount of valuable space.  Rather than taking the common-sense Japanese approach of the shako shomeisho (proof of parking), however, American states and cities have engaged in onerous mandatory inclusionary zoning for cars (parking minimums), zoning exemptions (e.g. not counting garages toward FAR limits and allowing parking, but not housing, in mandated setbacks), tax exemptions (only 16 states maintain a personal property tax that covers automobiles) and fringe benefits (the commuter parking benefit), in addition to rent-free public housing for cars (overnight on-street parking).  Whereas in 1940, buying and operating a car to escape urban housing costs simply shifted the balance of expenses, with a car costing almost half as much as the median home, in 2010 the prospect of doing so was much more economically feasible.  No doubt many of those New Yorkers of the 1940s and 1950s eventually drove those cars out of their subsidized parking spaces and off to the far reaches of Nassau, Bergen and Westchester Counties, and who could blame them?

Perhaps the biggest effect of all though, going back to the beginning of the post, relates to the obvious but important point that while housing production, and particularly in-city housing production, is subject to political constraints, car production is not (well, mostly not).  There even seems to be a difference in Americans' moral characterization of those who build homes and cars for profit: while a search for the phrase "greedy developers" returns over 60,000 hits, "greedy automakers" returns only 1,000.  From that perspective, the so-called "drive 'til you qualify" phenomenon, much questioned and criticized, is an entirely reasonable response to this economic reality, particularly given widespread lack of highway tolls. 

Making a full accounting of the political choices that have been made with regard to both housing and transportation is a daunting task, but it does help illuminate the residential patterns we see without the need to resort to moral judgments about those choices.

Related posts: Was the Rise of Car Ownership Responsible for the Midcentury Homeownership Boom in the US?

Sonia Hirt on the Origins of American Zoning

I've written about Professor Sonia Hirt's work previously, so I was glad to find out several months ago that she had a forthcoming book, Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation, which would address in detail some of her (and my) major research interests.  Hirt, who received her architectural training in Sofia, Bulgaria before earning a PhD in planning at the University of Michigan, has set out to answer the question which has plagued her since shortly after her arrival in the United States in the early 1990s, when she first encountered an American zoning code:

"How could Americans, whose reputation for being independent and freedom-loving and respecting private property was worldwide put up with such tedious laws governing the building of their everyday environments and way of life?"

The question has been examined before, though perhaps not as directly, and Hirt's citations include many prior books and studies that I have also discussed on the blog, including Robert Fishman's Bourgeois Utopias, Jonathan Levine's Zoned Out, Robert Fogelson's Bourgeois Nightmares, Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier, Robert Fischel's papers on zoning and many others.  Even Spiro Kostof and Besim Hakim (who has a new tome of his own focusing on Mediterranean urbanism) receive prominent mentions as Hirt surveys some 4,000 years of land-use regulation reaching back to Hammurabi.  Apart from addressing the question above, another of Hirt's major contributions with the book is to provide a broad-scope land-use comparison between American land-use laws and the laws of several other developed countries, including France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, Sweden, Japan and Canada.

One of Hirt's conclusions, that the United States is the only developed country of those surveyed, apart from Canada, to widely employ single-family detached residential zones that bar all commercial and multifamily uses, was anticipated by her previous work.  An equally important finding, in my opinion, is that the United States is the only country of those surveyed that does not conduct land use at the national or state level.  Although the federal government and certain states have dabbled in land-use law with housing anti-discrimination policies and anti-snob zoning statutes, and a few (such as Oregon) have delved more deeply into regional planning, there is no national land-use law (despite the federal government owning 650 million acres of land) nor does any state prescribe zoning categories that municipalities must follow.  Hirt also surveys a wide range of US zoning ordinances and finds little evidence that, despite the zoning reforms of the past 20 years, including the emergence of form-based codes, there has been any revolution in American zoning practice either in substance or procedure.

How this exceptionally American land-use system came into being during the late 1800s and through to the 1930s is the primary focus of Hirt's book.  In chronicling this period, many apparent paradoxes present themselves: for instance, although the United States of the late 19th century prided itself on being the most democratic nation in the world, its citizens had a low level of trust in their elected municipal officials.  The progressive municipal reformers of the time might therefore have campaigned for planning to be guided by state or federal governments, but instead pushed for non-discretionary municipal-level zoning.  As Hirt observes, zoning reformers such as Lawrence Veiller argued that "zoning rules should vary as little as possible in districts that were as large as possible and that zoning relief should be granted only under a very limited set of circumstances, if at all."

But if the planning powers were delegated from state to city, and the city was to have little power to alter the apparently infallible choices of the initial zoning commissions, who was left to actually engage in city planning?  No one, as it turns out.  Planning commissioners were seemingly intended to be little more than curators of the city zoning map, and Hirt finds, as I have also noted, that zoning maps have changed relatively little in their basic allocation of space since the 1920s.  As I've written about before, the actual policy that zoning was intended to serve was almost an afterthought, and was primarily concerned with protecting the investments of wealthy homeowners.  By default, and perhaps unintentionally, city planning (to the extent it existed at all) was turned over to the emerging highway engineering profession.

American zoning policy, in sum, was a negative and reactive vision -- through its implementation, it viewed cities as incapable of honest and effective self-government, and by its actual regulations, it viewed urbanization as a threat to not only investments but to civic spirit and even the American way of life itself. As Hirt writes, "[t]he single-family home had the right to the city: it was always seen as being there first. It was the gracious host, the delicate victim, and the original citizen that was always haunted, followed, invaded, and taken advantage of by other housing types." In this sense, Hirt's book echoes the conclusions of Steven Conn's recent Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century.

Has the American zoning system secured the benefits promised by its proponents?  Hirt crunches the numbers and finds that the United States is distinct among Western nations neither in its rate of ownership nor its proportion of single-family homes (see below chart).  Australia beats the US at its own game, having a higher levels of both detached and attached single-family homes with higher homeownership, despite even higher rates of urbanization.  Hungary, with almost identical proportions of attached and detached single-family housing, has much higher homeownership.   Interestingly, the chart shows no correlation whatsoever between proportion of single-family homes and the rate of ownership.  The emergence of the condominium form of ownership, unanticipated by the zoning proponents of the 1920s, appears to have severed the link between detached homes and the homeownership rate.

Source: Hirt (2014) and Japan Statistical Yearbook 2013.

The American achievement appears to be the high proportion of detached single-family homes, which on this chart is behind only Australia, Croatia and Hungary, as well as the size of those homes.  Hirt cites evidence from Fischel's work that, to me, shows that American focus on legal protections for the detached home form may have actually impeded growth in the homeownership rate by establishing excessively large minimum lot sizes.  In Japan, by contrast, families are able to purchase slivers of urban land, which enables robust single-family homeownership levels in an intensely urbanized country.  The same is true in Mexico, where homeownership, overwhelmingly of attached homes, is around 80%.

It appears that, in the United States, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the exclusionary principle and the notion of ownership as investment are (or have become) the primary concerns of local planning and of national housing policy and finance rather than promoting homeownership.  Those policies, though, are beyond the scope of Hirt's book and this post as well.

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Related posts:

• Where Zoning Went Wrong
• Housing Dreams, American and Mexican
• Did Zoning Ever Conserve Property Values?
• Vancouver and the Zoning Straitjacket
• The Zoning Straitjacket, Part II
• Zoning, Here and in France
• Ever Since Euclid
• Was the Rise of Car Ownership Responsible for the Midcentury Homeownership Boom in the US?

Housing Dreams, American and Mexican

In the previous post, I observed how newly-built single-family housing in the Mexican border city of Matamoros (and in fact in most Mexican cities) is both much smaller in size and far cheaper, even adjusting for lower incomes, than almost any housing in the United States outside of Detroit.

New Matamoros rowhouses. (Google Maps).

This is partially due to the underdevelopment of the mortgage banking industry in Mexico, with the result that six percent of all homes in the country are financed with mortgages. The vast majority of homes are either inherited, bought with cash, or else are self-built on cheap vacant land, although informal lending systems among friends and family members no doubt lie behind many of these cash purchases. In the absence of debt-financed home consumption, most new homes must be very modest to match the limited purchasing power of potential buyers. 

Although one might expect this lack of financing to impair individual property ownership, a surprising 80 percent of Mexicans own their own homes. This compares to a rate of only 65 percent in the United States, where 70 percent of homes are encumbered with mortgages and only 1 in 10 buyers pays in cash (at least, until the recent surge in buying by institutional investors). As I pointed out in a previous post, the homeownership rate in the US has actually been more or less stagnant since the mid-1960s in spite of extraordinary efforts to expand the availability of credit.

I think there is something else at work here, though, beyond the influence of two very different lending environments, and it relates back to the modest size of houses observed in Mexican cities. It's been a point often noted that the average size of new American homes has been steadily increasing since 1950 even as household sizes have fallen. Home sizes and household sizes have diverged so sharply, in fact, that a major structural mismatch has emerged throughout the US housing market, as shown below (charting percentages of all US housing units and all US households):

Data from 2012 ACS three-year estimates.

Although over 60% of US households consist of just one or two people, only 13% of housing units are studios or have one bedroom. Moreover, we know that very few single-family homes of the type produced over the past few decades years have been studios or one bedrooms (or even two bedrooms), making it likely that most of these units are apartment rentals. This can be confirmed through housing data on tenure status, which show that studio and one bedroom units are overwhelmingly renter-occupied:

Data from 2012 ACS five-year estimates.

Homeownership in the United States, evidently, is very much a large or larger-home phenomenon (assuming that number of bedrooms is a reasonable proxy for housing unit size). When owned units are looked at in isolation, this fact becomes even more startling:

Data from 2012 ACS five-year estimates.

In essence, new single-family detached or attached homes intended for just one or two people, of the size built in mass quantities in Mexico, virtually do not exist in the United States. A Zillow or Trulia search in most any major American city will quickly show that this type of home largely ceased being built after the late 1950s, which, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, is about the same time that the homeownership rate began to level off. Today, only about one in ten new single-family homes have two or less bedrooms. Although this might be understandable if the decline had been offset by significant increases in the proportion of small units in multifamily buildings, it turns out that this has not been the case.

To what extent these patterns are an expression of consumer preferences, market forces, financial and tax incentives and/or land use restrictions (such as minimum lot or square footage restrictions) is unclear, although there is evidence that square footage restrictions generally seem to have appeared at around the same time as smaller homes ceased being built in large numbers and to have increased in restrictiveness thereafter.* Very small houses, and very small lots, have in typical American zoning fashion been segregated and stigmatized in so-called trailer parks (note that Matamoros, despite being poorer than any American city, apparently has no trailer parks).

Tiny House movement circa 1921:
"Just the thing for two people!"

Whatever the explanation, the effect must be to impede further increases in homeownership. As the country has undergone a long-term reduction in household size, the market has produced fewer and fewer for-sale options sized for small households. The options that remain are not ideal. One can either buy a home that is far larger and more expensive than one needs or enter a competitive rental market for legally restricted multifamily supply (large swaths of American cities, due to restrictive zoning, have few or no apartments for sale at all). An additional option — subverting late 20th century cultural norms* by renting out rooms within a single-family dwelling larger than needed for just one or two occupants — invariably raises the hackles of incumbent homeowners (as seen in the occupancy limit controversy in Austin and many other cities).

These trends have been noted countless times before, in particular by Christopher Leinberger, while Nathan Lewis has been adamant about the need for an increase in production of much smaller homes (including multifamily construction) and, just as importantly, the availability of much smaller building lots. Americans seem to have some difficulty conceptualizing separately-owned very small homes on small lots, though, and even when structures of this size are recognized as meeting an important market need, they are typically imagined as mere accessories to "proper" single family homes, not least by the New Urbanists themselves. Still, that is an approach that tries make something better out of the traditional American pattern of building a series of small houses (on their own separate street network!) just for cars to live in:

Indianapolis residential alley with garages, origin ca. 1920s. (Google Maps).

The Tiny House movement, which partly emerged in reaction to the financial burden imposed by large homes, has no such hang-ups, though the emphasis seems to be almost exclusively on shrinking the size of the home, rather than the size of the lot, and is often associated with rural environments (though certainly not always, and also see here). But large houses seem to be a natural fit for oversized lots and overbuilt infrastructure, as Nathan Lewis has noted.

What would be a reasonable price goal, within the context of the dominant single-family detached form, for housing cost using both small homes and small lots? Nathan, in his writings on this subject, aims for $50,000, which, when adjusted for higher American incomes, would be roughly comparable to the greenfield homes of Matamoros. Nick Derome estimated $170,000 for very small-lot homes in surburban Toronto in comments on the previous post. For even the highest cost towns in Fairfield County, Connecticut, based on land prices, 1,000 sq. ft. homes of less than $200,000 appear financially (if not politically) feasible. Going almost anywhere else from such a high cost location, prices should drop significantly.

Even within certain parts of ultra-expensive Fairfield County itself, the few manufactured and/or mobile homes available for sale (the only type of contemporary single-family detached housing that, with its special zoning designation, has anywhere close to the lot sizes found in Matamoros) tend to run around $60,000 for a 1,000 sq. ft., two-bedroom home. Higher quality architecture and construction — such as that found on the Katrina cottages or better — could surely be provided at only somewhat greater expense. A major challenge, it would seem, is not simply surmounting legal barriers, but reaching an understanding that small homes are not just for poor families, but for small families and others too.

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Related posts: It turns out I'm not the first to connect Tiny Houses and Mexican urbanism -- an American homebuyer in the Mexican city of Merida linked the two on his blog here. Also, Life Edited opines on Why Household Size Matter and Why Are American Homes So Big?

*In striking down a Connecticut town's law fixing the minimum home size at 1,300 square feet (under challenge by a builder attempting to construct a 1,000 sq. ft. modular home), the Connecticut Supreme Court noted "the significant increase of the minimum floor area requirements over the years since 1955 when [the town] had its first regulation controlling minimum floor area requirements. At that time, the minimum floor area requirements were only 750 square feet for a one-story house... ." Builders Service Corporation v. Planning & Zoning Commission (1988). Similar New Jersey ordinances dated as early as 1949.

*Consider the connotations of the very term "single-family dwelling" and what it implies about the identity of the inhabitants of such a dwelling. However, such creative use of single-family dwellings used to be very common, legal and accepted as more or less ordinary (for an example, browse the appendix of the 1950 Housing Census, which describes a bewildering array of housing arrangements within a single home that enumerators might encounter).