This story by Andrew Burleson appeared on StrongTowns.org on September 25, 2024. We are sharing it in two parts.
As mentioned in Part One, most American cities today employ near-Soviet levels of central planning to micromanage the use of property. Unsurprisingly, we have crippling shortages of shelter, and high rents. We discussed the changes slowly taking place, such as the elimination of single-family zoning, and deregulation of parking.
While not yet widespread, two other incremental development reforms have been gaining recent attention.
Preapproved building plans: South Bend, Indiana has pioneered preapproved building plans. Rather than requiring a lot owner to hire an architect, pay for a custom design, and then play a game of guess-and-check with the city to find out if it will be allowed, property owners can pick from a catalog of preapproved building designs and get a permit immediately. This saves owners a lot of time and energy, while also guaranteeing that they’ll build nice buildings that fit well with the surrounding neighborhood. More cities are considering this as an option to streamline the construction of things they know they want.
“Shot Clocks”: The worst problem with development regulation is that it’s often nondeterministic and can be held up indefinitely. It can take many years to get approvals, if they can be obtained at all. By contrast, Minnesota has a broad automatic approval statute: Many state authorities have 60 days to make a decision or else the development is automatically approved. This forces cities to actually make decisions about projects, not just leave them in limbo forever. Texas recently followed Minnesota’s lead with an even shorter 15-day shot clock for residential projects. More cities and states are considering adopting shot clocks to ensure reasonable development review times.
Distant, but Possible
The changes mentioned next haven’t emerged in the wild yet. However, they are rising in the discourse in the same way that changes like relaxing single-family-only zoning were 10-20 years ago. While I think the probability of these changes occurring is low, they build on the higher-probability reforms above in a logical way, so it’s possible we might see movement in these directions if the reforms above are widespread and successful.
Lower bar for owner-occupants: Cities have good reasons to be skeptical of large-scale developers building huge projects that fundamentally change the neighborhood. But there’s a lot less risk to individual owners doing small-scale projects for their own home or small business. By definition, they have a lot of skin in the game, and they have to face the neighbors! Cities could embrace this and offer simplified rules and streamlined permitting for owner-occupants.
Next increment by right: One of Strong Towns’ priority campaigns is to allow the next increment of development by right. In other words, if you currently live in a single-family home, you should be allowed to make a second unit in your home, whether that’s by adding a backyard cottage, retrofitting an apartment or even remodeling into a duplex. If you own a corner store, you should be allowed to build a second floor for an office or apartment space. These small incremental changes are part of the magic of how cities have always evolved — we’ve unnaturally shut this process down, and we need to bring it back.
Adaptive Code: An idea I first wrote about and championed back in 2010, “Adaptive Code” is the idea of reforming our whole system around the idea of “next increment by right.” Instead of drawing colors on the map to determine what’s allowed, we’d replace zoning with a formula that looks at what’s built on neighboring lots and allows a slight increase. We can imagine a very simple version of this: If both neighboring buildings are one story tall, then a two-story building is allowed. Bits of this model exist in the wild — for example, Denver’s setback rules roughly say that a building must be built as close to the street as its neighbors are.
Repealing Euclid: The most radical change would be to reconsider whether the city has the right to dictate what landowners can do with their property at all. This Supreme Court precedent is a strange outlier compared to the rest of property law, and it’s possible to imagine a well-crafted legal appeal could rise to the level of the Supreme Court and overturn it. This seems unlikely today, if only because it would be such a radical change from the status quo. However, if land use reform gains momentum for another decade or two, we could imagine repealing Euclid as the climactic moment in a generational effort to restore property rights.
Conclusion
There’s tremendous widespread momentum for relaxing single-family-only zoning and removing parking minimums. Thus, there’s a very high probability that these reforms will be adopted in most of the country in the next decade. Other incremental reforms are highly likely to pass in specific locations as cities experiment to try and solve their development problems.
When we combine these land use reforms with the transportation evolution that’s already underway, I expect we will see a major shift in how our cities grow.
Since the 1950s, most growth has been via horizontal expansion. I believe that, in the next 70 years, we’re likely to experience an inversion where most growth is incremental infill.
Instead of the default new house being a DR Horton subdivision built on the edge of town, the default new house will be a townhome blended into an existing neighborhood. Instead of the default new apartment being a massive 5-over-1 at the edge of a historically lower-income neighborhood or built on a new suburban arterial, the default new apartment will be a fourplex built a block or two from a neighborhood main street. Instead of the default new commercial space being an office park or strip mall, the default new commercial space will be a second floor added to an existing retail building or a new shop built over formerly underused parking spaces.
All of this means that there will be an enormous economic opportunity for the neighborhood incremental developer over the megaproject builder.
Andrew Burleson has served as Chairman of the Board for Strong Towns since 2014, and has been a key advocate for Strong Towns’ evolution from an engineering-centric blog to a broader, movement-building organization. Andrew lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife and four children.