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This story is part of a Reporter’s Notebook series for Inman Intel that accompanies our larger feature on utopian cities. Read the main feature here.
That it’s hard to build new housing in America is probably no surprise to anyone. But it’s worth noting that home construction wasn’t always as hard as it is now, and that the current development landscape is the result of very intentional choices — many of them made in the recent past.
Today, about three quarters of the residential land in the U.S. is zoned exclusively for single family homes, meaning it’s impossible to add denser housing such as fourplexes or apartment buildings. Zoning thus acts as a severe constraint on buildable land and new housing.
CAN FUTURISTIC UTOPIAS SOLVE OUR HOUSING CRISIS?
But this situation is relatively new. For example, scholars at UCLA have found that in 1960, regulations in Los Angeles would have allowed for enough housing units in the city to accommodate about 10 million people. (The city didn’t already have that many housing units back then, but that’s how many units could have been built under that era’s regulatory regime.)
But due to an ongoing series of citizen-led downzoning efforts — or, NIMBYism, which stands for “not in my back yard” — that limited the construction of multifamily buildings, LA’s population capacity was reduced by the mid 1990s to fewer than 4 million people.
Credit: UCLA
The UCLA scholars’ paper on what happened is titled “The Homeowner Revolution,” which nods to the fact that it was largely incumbent property owners who pushed for caps on development. This wasn’t some sort of accident or historical curiosity. It was an intentional choice.
And despite some progress in loosening regulations, LA’s housing capacity is still nowhere near what it was in the mid twentieth century.
Similar situations unfolded in cities across the U.S., severely limiting developers’ abilities to construct new housing. Some areas are now rolling those regulations back, but the process is slow and obstacles such as NIMBYism remain.
Today, for builders who do manage to navigate the Kafkaesque maze of building regulations in their cities, the cost to add housing can be astronomical. In LA, the median cost to build a single unit of new affordable housing rose to $600,000 this year. On the other side of the country, a developer in Queens, New York City, recently shared on social media that he is spending $30 million to build a 39-unit building. That breaks down to nearly $770,000 per unit.
