An independent panel of 117 economists and housing experts polled in Zillow’s Home Price Expectations (ZHPE) Survey have suggested that relaxing zoning rules is one of the best ways to address the nation’s ongoing housing affordability crisis as it would allow more housing within existing neighborhoods and communities. 73% of those surveyed ranked this solution as one of the most effective means to address affordability.
“It seems straightforward: We need to build more homes,” said Dr. Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist. “Changes through policies like modest densification will give us more ‘at bats’ to create density and help communities stay livable for everyone. Without a huge injection of new homes in the near future, affordability will continue to be a challenge for many — especially for first-time home buyers.”
Panelists were asked to select several policies they believe would improve housing affordability and to rank the policies by effectiveness. While changes to zoning was the clear favorite for policy choice among panelists, the second-most-popular choice was to encourage governments to approve and build affordable housing more quickly, with 59% of economists believing it would be effective. Other policy changes, such as converting downtown commercial zones to encourage more residential use, providing tax credits to incentivize new home construction and relaxing design requirements such as parking mandates, received modest support from the expert panel.
“Restrictive and exclusionary zoning, artificial barriers, and NIMBY opposition have combined to create an unprecedented and persistent housing shortage,” said Mike Kingsella, CEO of Up for Growth, an industry think tank. “Failure to address these issues will create lower economic output and fewer opportunities for everyone. Families and individuals will be forced to pay higher rents, the equity gap will widen, and transportation costs will rise as people are forced to travel greater distances for work and education.”
;
Bad idea, this would take local control away and an unaffected organization would control your city.
This idea is the VERY REASON that there has been so much
“Urban flight” from the Public
School systems in the USA.
People will only want to live
where the public schools are
good enough to warrant the
60% “deduction” from their
ad valorem taxes to support them. (Incidentally, the US is one
if only THREE countries that fund
the public schools with ad valorem taxes.)
Changes to Zoning does not add affordable housing all by itself. Ask the Biden administration why he is choosing to raise interest rates. The interest rates are effecting affordable housing to the regular people. If you build affordable housing in NYS you can get a 10yr tax abatement. The average person doesn’t get this tax abatement. Only the builder (who can afford to build) is getting this discount. The builder or owner is not paying the school taxes at this point. Who is paying the school taxes? The middle class. To build affordable housing in the suburbs would increase transportation costs for the income challenged and make employment harder with increased distance. So increase taxes for the rest to pay for public transportation out to the suburbs and the schooling for all the added students? This is a garbage article that makes no sense. If there were facts to this article they would know about all the tax abatement programs for the developers and not the regular people who are going to pay for the future services. Even if you do own your home by 80yrs old, most lose them because they can’t pay the taxes to the town/county/school. We never really own our homes…..