A City Needs A Heartbeat

Modest but broad zoning reform is what many anti-development people would support if they meant what they said

So this tweet was sent recently by a local news station. Here’s the story itself. What policy would you think the tweet is describing?

Both the tweet and the headline, as it happens, are misleading. I’m not sure if they’re intentionally misleading—I think probably not, actually. But they’re mistaken nonetheless. I suspect that a lot of regular people couldn’t say off the bat why these are misleading.

It depends on what you mean by “could be torn down” and “considers replacing.” This makes it sound like someone would be doing this—like it would be a thing that would just happen to homeowners. Without any context at all, it sounds like it’s talking about the county exercising eminent domain over single-family homeowners in order to build multifamily buildings. I don’t think I have to tell you that isn’t what it’s referring to. From the story:

Under a new proposal, almost every single family home in Montgomery County could be torn down and replaced with a duplex, a triplex, four townhomes, or in some cases a small apartment building.

When approved by the County Planning Board in June, the board's chair called it a way to boost the stock of attainable homes, what is often called the missing middle of housing.

“This simply allows for property owners to have the option to build something else and give more people the chance to call Montgomery County home,” said Chair Artie Harris.

Now, it’s up to the county Council to turn the attainable housing plan into a bill. Council President Andrew Friedsen is a supporter….

But not everyone likes the idea. Some homeowners in single-family communities have complained about an unwanted change to their neighborhoods and County Executive Marc Elrich is firmly opposed.

Here is the County’s material on the proposal, which they’re calling Attainable Housing Strategies:

The Attainable Housing Strategies initiative, launched on March 4, 2021, recommends zoning modifications and other policy changes that would allow greater opportunities for Missing Middle Housing, which refers to a range of buildings that are compatible in scale, form and construction with single-family homes, but offer more than one housing unit, including a variety of duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes or flats. The proposed changes include a requirement for small scale attainable housing to adhere to the same setbacks, lot coverage and height restrictions as a single-family detached house….

The Attainable Housing Strategies initiative includes recommendations for three tiers or levels of development:  

• Small Scale Attainable Housing : Small scale attainable housing is what would be found in single-family neighborhoods. It refers to multi-unit buildings such as duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes that maintain the general size and scale of single-family homes in existing neighborhoods….

In other words, this is a very similar proposal to the Missing Middle/Zoning for Housing reforms passed in Arlington County and the city of Alexandria in Virginia, which I just wrote about. They permit moderate increases in density by permitting structures in single-family zones that largely adhere to the characteristics of the existing structures, but which have 2-4 units.

There’s the amateur mistake of conflating or appearing to conflate the buildings with the zoning—i.e., the implication that because there’s now permission to build something other than a single-family home, single-family homes are threatened or not allowed anymore. Or that there’s some overarching intentionality in their being replaced. Like this reform or don’t like it, but it doesn’t prohibit anything, nor does it require anything.

But the other point here is more subtle. People often oppose development because they perceive it as enabling big, outside actors to change their communities. I know a business owner and housing advocate in my hometown who’s very happy that a big project in our town is being done by a local developer and not a big, faceless company that sees our town only as an investment opportunity. Maybe it ultimately doesn’t matter who does the building or commercial landlording, but I think that’s a kind of good localism.

However, the fact is, allowing individual homeowners or property owners to build small-scale multifamily buildings, or to sell to presumably smaller companies that specialize in small multifamily buildings in existing neighborhoods (rather than the big tract-house builders) is allowing a kind of participatory development. If the people who oppose development because of big greedy corporate developers meant precisely what they were saying, they would embrace the kind of moderate zoning reforms that Montgomery County, Arlington County, and the city of Alexandria passed or are considering.

What will actually be happening in these localities, in all instances where an old single-family house is torn down and replaced, is that a property owner sells to a small developer, or even has a new building built and becomes a small landlord. These kinds of reforms are a way to push down the barriers of entry for building and leasing. Broad, incremental, moderate upzoning across a locality is putting control of development back in the hands of residents and smaller enterprises, which are more likely to be local. The more restrictive and complicated a zoning code is, the more likely the only things that get built will be big, and will be driven by big developers with the cash and lawyers to navigate the process. Everyone else is locked out.

In other words, change at the lot/building scale, distributed across a whole locality, with the potential participation of long-term residents, is exactly the kind of rule set that should be allowed, and should have been allowed all along. If that had been the code from the start, we would never have had the expectation of neighborhoods being built once and never changing again. We would probably not need so many larger projects if more housing demand had slowly been absorbed more incrementally across more geography.

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And there’s another irony here: there’s absolutely nothing stopping anybody in Montgomery County, except perhaps in the odd historic district, from tearing down a single-family home. The only stipulation in most of the county is that the only thing that can replace it is another single-family home. Older, smaller, cheaper (and yes, sometimes quite worn out) homes are demolished and rebuilt as larger, brand new, more expensive homes all the time. I wrote about and photographed this phenomenon in Fairfax County, but you see it in the older single-family neighborhoods all over the D.C. region. So despite the specter of “tearing down,” that part of it isn’t going to change.

There are people who understand all of this and simply want their neighborhoods to remain as they are. I don’t think that is feasible in a region with a severe housing crunch, but at least it’s an honest opinion. But there are people who misunderstand what exactly these zoning reforms would do, and there are people who mistakenly or intentionally misrepresent them.

Every once in awhile I think it’s useful to restate some of these urbanist first principles, and one of those is that the ideal mode of change in the built environment is not stasis punctuated by disruption, but a healthy, distributed background hum. We bury our cities and then, once in awhile, violently dig them up from the grave. Instead, they should have a heartbeat.

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Related Reading:

What Housing Crisis?

Ugly Buildings and Open Space

Misunderstanding the Meaning of “Housing Crisis”

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