There’s not a city in the country that’s gone untouched by America’s housing crisis.
Rent has soared in recent years. So has the number of low-income renters. And it’s happening as the supply of affordable housing is decreasing.
To address the housing gap, legislators and local planners are reexamining the role of zoning.
For decades, zoning in America has prioritized the construction of single-family homes and large apartment buildings.That’s left a shortage in what’s known as middle housing.It includes structures like townhouses, duplexes, and small apartment complexes of up to twenty units that house multiple families on a single lot.
The push to rezone single-family lots to allow for more middle-housing development is a practice called upzoning.We first checked in on upzoning in 2019, when cities Minneapolis, Charlotte, Portland, and Seattle were testing it out.
Since then, Oregon, California, and Maine have revised their regulations to effectively end single-family zoning. And many cities across the country have implemented similar policies.
We explore how these zoning changes are affecting the strained housing market, and why they’re not enough to fix the country’s housing crisis.
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