Single Family Zoning in Seattle and The Limited Logic of Euclid

I'd wanted to write a few words about the recent controversy over single-family zoning Seattle, but that debate has been addressed so well and thoroughly by other writers that I'm not going to rehash the details.  Apart from the local politics of that debate, one thing that it has accomplished is to assist in highlighting exactly what single-family zoning means in an American context.

Although it sounds self-explanatory, the term "single-family home" has a distinct perception and legal meaning that goes well beyond the mere physical form of a dwelling.  Through a series of court cases, including the Euclid v. Ambler decision, American courts have gradually allowed the enshrinement of this perception into law with hardly so much as a dissenting opinion.

Many of those debating single-family zoning in Seattle (and in other cities) take these various legal incidents for granted as an integral part of an area devoted to standalone houses, although they are conceptually and legally separable.

The American Conception of the "Single-Family Home"

The typical American single-family home, and the zone within which it lies, are defined by (at least) five key legal elements which I've laid out below.  I call this conception "American" in line with Sonia Hirt's analysis in her recent book, Zoned in the USA, where she discusses how the single-family zone, as defined below, is a century-old American invention, and is rarely found in the land use codes and regulations in other countries.

Although the the debate generally focuses on the third of these (limitations on units), and sometimes the fourth, each of these supporting elements are essential to sustaining the American ideal of the single-family zone.  Remove any of them and the concept breaks down.

That allowing some non-residential uses would transform single-family areas seems too obvious to mention, although the consequences of doing so are often greatly exaggerated.  Many residential streets are simply not economically viable sites for commercial activity, and certainly not those which depend on a high volume of customers.

An abolition of minimum lot sizes, in fact, might be even more transformative.  On the typical housing lot of 6,000 square feet bordering street and alley, three or more detached homes might be built.  On Twitter,  Mike Eliason provided a photo of how this very result was feared by the incumbent homeowners of the 1920s (at right).  These were single-family detached homes, to be sure, but they violated the perception of what a proper single-family home should be (aside from stirring up various other anxieties and prejudices).

Setbacks and FAR limitations predated limitations on units, and in conjunction with minimum lot sizes were used to achieve the same result, as well as to enforce aesthetic preferences (specifically, for large front lawns).  With their intention of making impractical and uneconomical all but detached, one-family houses, they incidentally also forbid other types of single-family housing, including the ancient typologies of courtyard homes and rowhouses.

Limitations on units are the the essence of the single-family designation, and lend the category its name.  This limitation often tests the bounds of rationality and common sense: on what ground, for instance, could one permit single-family homes on lots of 5,000 sq. ft. but prohibit a two-unit structure on 10,000 square feet?  Occupancy limits, covered thoroughly by Alan Durning in a series at the Sightline website, are a means of closing a final loophole and preventing detached, single-unit homes from being adapted to multi-household use as dormitory-style SRO housing with shared kitchen or bathroom spaces.

Zoning Ideology and Housing Prejudice

As should be clear from the above, the single-family zone, far from the straightforward concept that it it pretends to be, is a complex and artificial legal construct with many interlocking parts designed to forbid any deviation, no matter how slight, from the ideal.  Nor is some universal concept which is simply given recognition in law: in many or most countries, the idea of regulating housing in such a manner is not even conceived of. In Japanese zoning law, for instance, only bulk and height are regulated, and no attempt is made to restrict how the space within the building envelope is divided into living quarters.

The phantom triplex: using the language of interior spatial
division to imply differences in outward form.

At the dawn of American zoning, there was some concern that this sort of regulation -- one which specified that having more than one unit in a structure was sufficient to make that structure a different type of use --  would be found to exceed a city's legislative power (this from Edward Murray Bassett's Zoning):

At the time of Bassett's writing, courts had already upheld lot coverage maximums and height limits, which together could be deployed to greatly restrict net buildable square footage on any given lot.  The question remained whether within this building envelope a city could restrict the number of units (kitchens, essentially).  Bassett, a lawyer who always seemed to worry more as to whether courts would uphold his ideas than whether the ideas themselves were sound, was concerned that this would go beyond the legislative purposes for which zoning had been authorized by the states.

By the time the Euclid decision was issued by the Supreme Court in 1926, however, rhetoric was already triumphant over meaning, so much so that it rendered specious nearly all of the court's reasoning with regard to the exclusion of multi-unit structures.  That reasoning, casually tacked on to the court's primary analysis regarding use-based zoning, is set out below:

"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses . . . . Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets . . . ." (Emphasis added).

All the court is doing here is recapitulating its decision in Welch v. Swasey in which it upheld restrictions on height and bulk (essentially, the establishment of a three-dimensional building envelope).  It does not squarely address whether a city could restrict the number of units in buildings constructed within existing height and bulk limits.*  It does not address whether a city could ban multi-unit buildings even where they are no denser, in units/acre, than single-unit structures.  It does not address whether parking concerns are valid in an area where on-street parking is prohibited or where parking and traffic is managed by some other means than the one imagined by the court.  In other words, Bassett's primary concern regarding the constitutionality of single-unit structures, as a separate use, goes entirely unaddressed. 

Without a concrete controversy before it, the court had no need to utter the notorious words in the passage above, which as noted above were largely irrelevant to the actual issues in controversy surrounding multi-unit buildings.  It would have sufficed to note, as the court actually did later in the opinion, that zoning ordinances must be assessed in detail rather than in generality.  The court realizes this toward the very end of the opinion: "In the realm of constitutional law especially, this Court has perceived the embarrassment which is likely to result from an attempt to formulate rules or decide questions beyond the necessities of the immediate issue."  This humble admission appears in the same opinion in which the highest court in the land slanders apartment buildings as "mere parasites."

The court did issue one opinion two years later striking down a zoning law in detail, in the slightly less well-known Nectow v. Cambridge case, but afterwards fell largely silent on zoning.  Bassett's question was not and has not ever been addressed by the Supreme Court, a fact which has been appreciated by a few authors going back at least as far as attorney Richard Babcock's 1983 article The Egregious Invalidity of the Exclusive Single-Family Zone. 

New Jersey's Reaction and the Final Triumph of Single-Family Zoning

A little-known postscript to Euclid, as described in William Fischel's recent Zoning Rules! book, is that the pro-property rights New Jersey Supreme Court refused to be swayed by the decision, instead adopting the narrow reading of it that I have suggested above.  Prior to the issuance of Euclid, the lower court, following New Jersey precedent, had done the following in a process reminiscent of the Mount Laurel doctrine's "builder's remedy" from many decades later:

"The Oxford Construction Company [applied] for a permit granting permission to erect four brick apartment houses upon a plot of ground located at the corner of Highland and Lincoln avenues, in that city. The application was refused upon the sole ground that the zoning ordinance of the municipality prohibited the erection of such buildings in that locality, no suggestion being made that their presence there would constitute a menace to the health, safety or welfare of the public. Thereupon, the construction company moved before the Supreme Court for the allowance of a writ of mandamus to compel the inspector to issue the permit applied for. Upon the final hearing of the cause, it appearing to the court that the presence of the proposed apartment houses in that locality would not endanger the public welfare, health or safety, a peremptory writ was directed."

The city appealed the decision claiming that this reasoning was invalidated by Euclid, but the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appears disagreed and upheld the lower court's result.  In response to this decision, Fischel explains that the New Jersey constitution itself was amended to permit single-family residential as a zoning category.  The text of that initial amendment, which seems to no longer appear in the constitution, is difficult to locate, but in any event the question at issue was not and has never been passed upon by the US Supreme Court.  With New Jersey's pro-property rights judiciary having been outflanked by the people themselves, single-family zoning seemed triumphant.

The Ongoing Debate

Ninety years after the Euclid decision, land use debates in the United States continue to be distorted by this same dichotomy between "single-family zoning" and "multifamily" areas.  Rather than talking about housing in terms of units/acre, or total floor area, or some other similar metric, we tend to use purported building types -- whether single-family, duplex, triplex, ADU or other such classification.  Yet these classifications are in a sense illusory.  Whether a builder puts up three detached homes on a lot, three stacked units in a triplex, or three side-by-side units in rowhouse form really shouldn't matter a great deal to the regulator.

The court's confusion on this point may have stemmed in part from the lack of a concrete controversy.  The respondent, Ambler Realty, was seeking to use its property for industrial purposes, and had no intention of constructing any residential buildings, much less apartments.  The dispute was an abstract one which only pertained to the value of the land.  Had the court been confronted with a scenario in which an individual builder sought to construct a two-unit building conforming to height and bulk regulations within a single-family zone, it could not have evaded the question so easily.

Writing in 1983, Babcock assessed the situation as follows: "Today, there can be no justification under the police power for compelling the construction of single-family houses.  The daring trial lawyer who chooses to litigate this issue will undoubtedly lose in the trial and intermediate courts.  But he should prepare his record with the Supreme Court in view.  Using as witnesses builders, demographers, engineers, planners, environmentalists, and land economists, he should build a record that once and for all demolishes the notion that the single-family detached house is to be forever isolated and protected."

Has this question been posed to any American court in the recent past?  Perhaps not as directly as this, but there have been small victories here and there against unreasonable minimum lot sizes and minimum home sizes in the courts of various states.  Victories have also been won, on occasion, under a fair housing rationale.  A combination of the reasoning from these victories, in the proper context, might yet succeed in the courts of one state or other.

--------------------

*As Alex Cecchini astutely notes in a recent post at Streets.mn, if we assume that the preservation of natural light is a valid purpose under the police power, it is not clear why these concerns are better addressed in a scheme where single-unit structures and multi-unit structures are segregated then where, by contrast, multi-unit buildings are scattered among single-unit structures.  In the former scenario, the multi-unit structures receive abundant light while shadowing only a small number of houses, whereas in the latter the multi-unit buildings all cast each other in shadow, resulting in a net loss in well-lit units.
   

Housing Innovations in Texas

Citylab recently posted an interesting profile of a new development in Harlingen, Texas by Amanda Kolson Hurley.  Having written about this area of the country earlier this year, I was curious to take a closer look at the development, which appeared to take some design cues from the Mexican urbanism that is just a short ride away from this border region.

An aerial view of the development, La Hacienda Casitas, shows it set among mobile home parks that are very common in Harlingen.  These homes, however, are site built, and use lots as small as 1,800 square feet, which is similar to the lots sizes found in the new developments of Matamoros, Mexico.  Streets range from 16 to 22 feet wide, with some on-street parking:

The more I looked around Harlingen, the more this particular development stood out: overwhelmingly, new development in the city consists either of mobile home parks or much larger suburban homes of the type found in sunbelt cities across the United States.  It was a pattern I'd seen before, in Bradenton, Florida, where the city's zoning code divided single-family housing into two types: large lot, site-built suburban and small-lot, manufactured and/or mobile.  Could land use in Harlingen be governed by similar provisions?

Fortunately, the city puts its zoning ordinance and map online in an easy-to-navigate format, so finding residential lot minimums was not difficult:

Here we see that Harlingen, like Bradenton, establishes a minimum lot size for lots in mobile home parks that is less than half that required in the single-family "R1" zone.  In fact, the ratio between the two zoning categories is nearly the same in both cities (Harlingen: 6000/2400 = 2.5 vs. Bradenton: 7200/3000 = 2.4).  Unlike Bradenton, Harlingen does not seem to establish minimum sizes for the dwellings themselves, although setback and lot coverage requirements impose effective maximums that are most restrictive on very small lots.

How well the city holds developers to the limits I cannot say for sure, although most lots in developments platted within the last 20 years appear to be between 6,000 and 7,000 square feet. On first blush the "Planned Development" zone appears to provide some flexibility, but it requires the developer to own a parcel of at least five acres, leaving it unavailable to small-scale builders designing infill projects.  Townhouses are also an option, but are not permitted by right in R1 zones.

In any event, the disparity between zones again appears to create a binary pattern of real estate prices, with new site-built homes on large lots averaging around $145,000, and manufactured homes only $45,000 or so.  Thanks to zoning-abetted filtering*, some site-built homes can be bought for no more than $60,000 to $70,000, but these tend to be of very low quality or on much smaller lots that seem to have been grandfathered in under the present zoning code.  This mandated land consumption obviously contributes to a low-density pattern of urban growth, and also illustrates how zoning's affordability and quality of life impact isn't limited to large coastal metros.  Harlingen's affordability safety valve, the mobile home district, establishes what is in effect a physically segregated zone for low-income, market-rate housing where even the homes themselves are forbidden from being site-built.

Homes in La Hacienda Casitas. Credit: bcWorkshop.

In light of all this, was the La Hasienda Casitas project an attempt to circumvent the code with a development of houses on tiny lots and narrow streets, thereby making occupancy (the homes appear to be rentals, at least for now) of new, freestanding and site-built homes available to low-income families of Harlingen?  Kolson Hurley's article discusses the intensive coordination and grant-seeking between and among architect bcWorkshop and non-profit housing developer Community Development Corporation of Brownsville needed to bring the project to fruition, but I have to wonder whether regulatory barriers, rather than anything inherent in the design and construction of this project, is what is standing in the way of adoption of the style by for-profit developers.


*Zoning-abetted in that the restriction of centrally-located lots to single-family use effectively caps land values, allowing the physical deterioration of the housing stock to play the predominant role in establishing property values.

Related posts:
Mobile Home Impediments and Opportunities
Cross-border Urbanism: From Texas to Tamaulipas

Where Zoning Went Wrong

In previous posts on zoning, I’ve been pretty hard on the Supreme Court’s Euclid v. Ambler decision, which upheld the use of single-use, and specifically single family-only, zones.  In doing so, the nation’s highest court gave the formal stamp of approval to exclusionary zoning, holding among other things that cities were justified in excluding so-called “apartment houses” from residential zones.

The fact that this dispute even reached the Supreme Court in the first place, however, indicates underlying policy choices that occurred somewhat earlier. Professor Sonia Hirt, who has done extensive research in the greatly underexplored comparative zoning realm, has shown how in Germany, a limited number of zoning categories are established at the federal level, with specific implementation left to local governments.  Although localities can choose where to place these zones, they cannot create zones of their own.  Simon Vallee (at Urban Kchoze) has described a very similar regulatory regime in Japan, where the national government has established a list of certain permissible zones that cities may use.  Hirt mentions similar but even more permissive zoning arrangements in other countries such as Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria. 

Notably, whether by coincidence or design, it appears that in none of these cases have state or national governments established single-family detached-only residential zones. In general, these countries establish only floor-area limitations, thereby allowing both single-family and multifamily housing in all residential areas, and also permit small offices and neighborhood commercial even in the most restrictive zones. Importantly, lot size and setback requirements appear to be modest or minimal.

In contrast to the experience of most other countries, the United States, right from the start, delegated zoning

Munich zoning map ca. 1900. From Harvard Library.

powers from states to localities in spite of the fact that early 20th century American planners greatly admired the German zoning system.  The best-known instrument of this delegation, although it was not the first, was the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, a document first devised in the early 1920s by Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department.

The Act was a curious document: although it spent many pages devoted to the legal proceduralism of planning commissions, it offered little guidance, and contained no requirements, as to how localities should actually zone. This intriguing and highly consequential omission was not due to lack of interest or expertise.  Edward Murray Bassett, a principal author of New York's 1916 Zoning Resolution and of much of the Enabling Act, authored a handbook on zoning (entitled “Zoning,” what else) in which he laid out its purposes and proper role. Bassett’s work, one of many on the topic from that time period by such men as Harland Bartholomew and Herbert Swan, establishes several major themes to distinguish zoning in the United States which were reflected in the enabling act and which have characterized American zoning practice ever since:

• Approval of the exclusion of commercial activity from residential zones. Bassett seems to have assumed, without explaining further, that excluding all commercial uses from residential areas was a desirable and legitimate end of zoning. Furthermore, he casually elided any distinctions between noxious and harmless uses: "[In] a residence district a home owner may try to carry on a sweat shop or a restaurant or a junk yard. How shall he be prevented? ... The ordinance should make such act unlawful and make provision for ousting the unlawful use." (p. 327).
• Failure to disapprove of the exclusion of multifamily from residential zones. Although Bassett struck a cautionary note toward single-family zones, this appears to have been primarily because he feared (mistakenly, it turned out) that courts would strike down such zones as lacking justification (p. 323-324). This, in turn, might have cast doubt on the fledgling enterprise of zoning. Elsewhere, he advocated for such zones as a means creating preserves for wealthy urban homeowners (p. 323). Bassett also suggested the use of maximum lot coverage ratios as an alternative means of discouraging apartment houses, notwithstanding that such coverage ratios would also have the effect of discouraging single-family homes on very small lots.
• Extreme deference to localities. Bassett recommended that enabling acts transfer power to regulate the height, bulk and use of buildings to cities, apparently without any restriction on how these powers might be deployed in various zones. The states were to retain little or no power in the zoning area under his proposed arrangement, nor were they to provide any guidance except for the very vague suggestions within the Enabling Act.  There was no reason presented for this policy choice, and transportation policy was in fact moving in the opposite direction at the same time, with states and the federal government playing larger roles in planning and building highway routes.
• Insistence on a "comprehensive" plan.  Although European zoning is often conducted on a block-by-block basis according to Prof. Hirt, and frequently leaves large central areas exempt from most restrictions, Bassett and other American zoning advocates insisted that courts would not accept such piecemeal or partial zoning, and that cities should therefore zone every inch of ground under their jurisdiction.  Allowing different zones within small and otherwise similar areas was also assumed to be unconstitutional "spot zoning," and was not advised.  Impliedly, these recommendations would intensify the use-segregated character and monotony of American zoning.  Nonetheless, once the initial plan was in place, selective rezonings (almost always downzonings) of politically influential neighborhoods were carried out and continue to be carried out to this day.
• Irreconcilable conflict between planning and zoning. Bassett acknowledged that "[e]very vital growing city must change and the zoning plan must be capable of change," but quickly clarified that "a high degree of permanency or stiffness must be insisted upon." In other words, although zoning was adopted in the name of looking "mainly to the future," in Bassett's words, in practice, it would be highly resistant to alteration. To achieve this, Bassett included a proposal to limit the power of the city council to alter the zoning plan once it had been established by, in essence, subjecting every proposed zoning change to a referendum requiring 80% support of affected owners (see p. 330). What's more, Bassett's logic against zoning changes used only examples of upzoning or increasing permitted uses (see p. 330).  Downzoning was not critiqued.
• Heavy reliance on legal process as a substitute for sound policymaking. Bassett, an attorney, was apparently aware that such permissive zoning powers might result in extremely restrictive regulations: "The letter of the ordinance and maps may be the extreme of hardship," he noted (p. 330). Rather than address this potential problem by advocating limits on zoning's restrictiveness at the start, Bassett suggested a Board of Adjustment with the power to grant variances. The obvious potential for abuse, graft and corruption in such an arrangement was noted by Bassett's contemporary, Lawrence Veiller, but the substance of Bassett's recommendations was included in the Enabling Act. Bassett dismissed these concerns out of hand in his book by noting that "it is the business of the mayor or appointing power to see that the board is made up of impartial and experienced men." (p. 331).
• Rejection of aesthetic concerns. The City Beautiful movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, although it shared certain policy goals with the early zoning advocates, embraced a traditionally European emphasis on the outward appearance of the city. Architecture was considered an integral part of city planning, and planning literature frequently included lavish illustrations setting forth a compelling aesthetic vision for the city (what might be called a form-based vision).  In Bassett's view, however, aesthetics could not even supply a rational basis for zoning regulations: "If [regulations] are employed ... for aesthetics or some sentimental object, courts will not support them," he wrote. In short, despite his professed admiration for European planning methods, Bassett was waving the white flag before a shot had been fired in the legal battle.  Bassett was wrong again about how the courts would respond, but with most codes having been adopted under the erroneous assumption that such concerns were illegitimate, it would take until the mid-1990s, with the rise of the New Urbanism and the development of form-based codes, that architecture, aesthetics and form were given a more conspicuous role in zoning documents.
• Concern with protecting the wealth of well-to-do homeowners.  Although Bassett stated that zoning "endeavors to protect investments" as a general matter, the investments he cites as examples tend to be those of very wealthy individuals seeking to erect expensive houses ("A man who built a $40,000 home ... was considered highly speculative because in a few years he might have an apartment house on one side and a factory on the other" (p. 316); "[A] man might put up a fine residence ... and find that the council had changed it to business and he was likely to have a butcher store on one side and a grocery on the other" (p. 330).  This was largely the extent of Bassett's social concern, such as it was, in his book. The interests of poor and middle-class residents, whether owners or tenants, went unmentioned by Bassett (in fairness, Andrew Wright Crawford, writing in 1920, claimed that zoning was "for the protection of the poor man," although did not address the exclusion of apartments).
• Lack of comparative focus. Although Bassett claimed to have been inspired to become involved in zoning matters after a visit to an urban design conference in Dusseldorf, his treatise dismisses European planning models early on as inapplicable to American constitutional government, thereby depriving readers of the chance to learn from non-American planning precedents. Bassett even goes so far as to claim that zoning New York took as long as it did because "there were almost no precedents to help," which was only true if one completely disregarded decades of European zoning practice.

Zoning didn't remain an entirely localized concern by any means: the federal government would, only a decade or so later, become indirectly involved though FHA lending practices, and several states have since adopted regional plans, though not one of the 50, so far as I know, sets out zoning categories that cities must use. Federal fair housing laws would also become entwined with local zoning practice in the 1960s and later, but only incidentally. These original purposes, however, have endured with relatively little change and virtually no challenge over the following ninety-plus years.  

I've quoted legal criticism of some of these doctrines in the past, but there was scholarly critique at the time, as well, from progressive authors, some of it quite strident, but most of it now forgotten. For instance, the German-born Bruno Lasker, writing in 1920:

"Whence, to ask a very simple question, do so many of the zoning commissions derive their sanction for dividing the physical make-up of the city into use districts that distinguish between the residential needs of different classes? ... Why, in this country of democracy, is a city government, representative of all classes of the community, taking it upon itself to to legislate a majority of citizens -- those who cannot afford to occupy a detached house of their own — out of the best located parts of the city area, practically always the parts with the best aspect, best parks and streets, best supplied with municipal services and best cared for in every way? Why does it deliberately segregate the foreign-born who have not yet become sufficiently prosperous to buy or rent a home under building regulations which preclude the possibility of inexpensive development and construction?"

Social justice inquiries like these evidently didn't keep a legal-minded pragmatist like Bassett or his allies up at night. What's more difficult to tell is whether, had the federal government not taken such an active role in promoting a vision of local government-based planning and zoning, a more European zoning model might have emerged in some states.

Related posts:

• h/t to Daniel Nairn for the link to Bassett's book from his post Edward Murray Bassett and the Origins of Zoning, which inspired this one.
• Did Zoning Ever Conserve Property Values?

The Problem with Schools and Housing Supply

In an earlier post, I discussed how the population of young adults and young children is rapidly declining in the wealthy suburbs of New York City, a trend previously noted by the New York Times.  Although I alluded to high housing costs being an important factor in these changing trends, I failed to mention an absolutely crucial element that is driving much of the opposition to increasing housing supply: school funding. This factor is so important that is helps explain not only regional patterns in the New York area, but the NIMBY attitudes prevalent throughout much of the United States that have been so heavily covered in recent books and articles.

While it's often pointed out that the American system for education funding creates great disparities both between states and among school districts within states, what's less often noted is that the same locally-slanted funding system greatly contributes to and reinforces opposition to increasing housing supply. A glance at the particulars of the funding system makes it immediately obvious why this should be the case. Crunching the numbers for the city of Rye, in Westchester County, the Zoning Plan blog estimates that:

"Only a small percentage of households in Rye pay enough school taxes to cover the cost of two children in the RCSD. Even most large new homes do not pay enough taxes to pay for two students."

I can't vouch for the accuracy of these particular estimates, but there's no doubt that the typical state's funding system, which places around 44% of the cost of funding local schools directly onto homeowners through local property taxes, punishes those jurisdictions that choose to increase their residential housing supply, and in particular the type of housing supply that is aimed at families with children.* The town that adds additional homes of this type has two basic options: either increase the tax burden on existing residents, with no improvement in the quality of education, or keep taxes constant while letting school quality decline.

The quoted blog is particularly interesting in how it illustrates how opposition to demolition of smaller homes, and their replacement with so-called McMansions, is linked to concerns about school-related property taxes. The site puts its bluntly: "We don’t want to be told we can’t replace a three bedroom, senior-friendly ranch, with a five bedroom, family-friendly colonial, but then, why should neighbors pay more school taxes and endure class-overcrowding when [school] enrollment increases?"

The blog suggests the common-sense solution of increasing the proportion of child-free households by constructing much smaller single-family homes to retain empty-nesters, something I've advocated previously.  In most American towns, however, and certainly in the elite suburbs of Westchester and Fairfield County, such a recommendation is likely to be met with intense hostility. Multifamily residential is even less welcome, and non-residential uses are feared as nuisances and traffic generators. Faced with the threat of larger homes bringing increased taxes and smaller homes portending decreased property values, the shrill NIMBY voice is raised against any project, large or small.* 

The typical American system of local school funding appears to be unique in the world, or nearly so. As psychologist Robert Slavin wrote in 1999:

"To my knowledge, the U.S. is the only nation to fund elementary and secondary education based on local wealth. Other developed countries either equalize funding or provide extra funding for individuals or groups felt to need it. In the Netherlands, for example, national funding is provided to all schools based on the number of pupils enrolled ... ."

Canada's provinces maintained a roughly analogous funding system in the not-too-distant past, but educational reforms in several provinces in the 1990s — notably in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta — brought about a transition from joint local-provincial school funding systems to provincial-level systems. These changes also seem to have involved a shift in funding sources away from local property taxes and toward general tax revenue. In the case of Alberta, these reforms are reported to have enabled a reduction in residential education property taxes of 65%.

The heavily localized school system in the United States long predated Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation, but incentives for localization were greatly increased with the Milliken v. Bradley decision from 1974, which endorsed political balkanization of urban areas as a means of evading desegregation mandates. In combination with exclusionary zoning codes, which the court had approved nearly 50 years earlier, self-governing municipalities were given almost every imaginable enticement and ability to restrict increases in housing supply. Since good schools, no matter what their enrollment, are associated with higher property values, the incentive is to create the best possible schools for the fewest possible students.

At worst, the result is an urban area composed of petty fiefdoms, each groaning under the weight of local property taxes and thus resistant to the arrival of any new families, but equally resistant to conceding any revenue or authority to higher-level governments. A handful of jurisdictions with legacy stocks of time-worn apartment rentals are made to absorb most of the region's low-income students, and with correspondingly lower levels of per-student funding. Is it any surprise that young families are deserting these areas in large numbers, as I showed was the case in Fairfield and Westchester Counties?

Not every state has so localized a school system, however. In Fairfax County, Virginia (a state that doesn't lack for its own school funding problems and controversies), where schools are run at the county level, property taxes are half the level of Westchester, achievement is comparable or higher, and the under-5 demographic, which is in freefall in Fairfield and Westchester despite overall population increase, is growing rapidly. Similarly, in Davidson County, TN, which merged with the city of Nashville 50 years ago, the 25-35 and under-5 populations have surged.

Westchester County school administrators object that the high cost of housing in the county requires higher teacher and staff salaries, but this too is partly a consequence of restricted residential supply. The attempt to exclude families in an effort to limit property taxes increase ends up inflating housing costs, and these increased costs are shifted back onto property taxes in the form of the increased employee salaries needed to account for the cost of living. Lately, cities have attempted to shift even this consequence onto the private sector by mandating inclusionary zoning for new development to provide for city employees (typically, law enforcement, firefighters and educators) unable to afford market prices, and doing so for purportedly altruistic reasons. However, when Darien, CT, attempted to limit its own inclusionary zoning program to so-called priority populations, including town employees, it drew attention from the Department of Justice.

Policymakers haven't been blind to the perverse incentives created by localized school funding. Massachusetts' Chapter 40R, which creates incentives for towns to upzone residential land, has companion legislation providing for additional funds for cities and towns that establish such upzoned districts to cover the costs of educating children who move into those same areas. Not that it has been successful in this end, at least as of a few years ago: according to a 2009 study, "[v]ery few districts approved to date allow construction of the type of housing (modest single family "starter" homes) that would be expected to trigger payments under [the law]."  In addition, the charter school phenomenon, although far too complex a topic to delve into in any detail here, frequently involves direct state-level funding of charter schools.

Even in Connecticut, the problem has long been known and obvious solutions proposed: a report from back in 2003 observed that the state was "badly in need of regional and statewide revenue raising and land-use planning for long-term development." In Connecticut's case, as is the case for many states, this is a solution that is easier said than implemented.

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*It's an easy task to find quotes from city and state officials raising concerns with affordable housing programs on the basis that they attract young families with children, typically prefaced with the caveat that the legislator in question doesn't disapprove of children per se. A state representative from the town of Trumbull, in Connecticut:, reacting to the effects of the state's affordable housing law (the notorious Section 8-30g): "The [affordable] developments tend to have children, and children are great. But the fiscal reality is that our schools have grown considerably. We've had to build a new school in part because of our increasing population. We would have had to have built it eventually, but that [affordable housing] sped that along."

*This paranoid mindset, especially when paired with other latent biases and prejudices, can result in what I would term "NIMBY derangement syndrome," where otherwise reasonable and mild-mannered homeowners make shocking, hysterical and/or outrageous claims and allegations, usually against so-called "greedy" developers.

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).