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Will Up-Zoning Make Housing More Affordable?

Will Up-Zoning Make Housing More Affordable?
Making neighborhoods denser is an idea with growing appeal. The question is whether it works.
June 17, 2019 •
Seattle’s housing market has been red-hot for almost a decade. Across the Northwest’s largest metropolitan area, real estate is not only expensive, upward of a million dollars for homes in some of the nicest enclaves, but often sells in a matter of days.
A complex of forces -- the growth of Amazon, the technological might of Microsoft, the jobs those companies bring and a dearth of available real estate -- has made Seattle one of the costliest housing markets in the country. Only San Francisco and Las Vegas have outpaced Seattle in rising home prices in the last six years, according to the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices report. It’s not just home-buying that has been expensive, but also renting. The rental market may have cooled some in the last year, but that’s after years of increases that outpaced inflation. From 2015 to 2016 alone, Seattle saw an almost 10 percent jump in rental prices. The tight market is part of the reason for the city’s surging homeless population.

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Philly Council turns to zoning overlays to control development

WHYY
By
Homes across from Fairmount Park at 33rd and Clifford streets included in a new Strawberry Mansion Neighborhood Conservation Overlay District. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY) (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
These days, everyone wants to talk to Tonetta Graham about overlays — a zoning tool that can be used to shape development in a specific area.
What would normally pass for municipal minutiae is a hot topic because Graham’s Strawberry Mansion Community Development Corporation and a coalition of other neighborhood groups recently won City Council approval for a special overlay district that aims to slow gentrification by restricting the height and density of new construction. Graham and her colleagues proposed the “Strawberry Mansion Neighborhood Conservation Overlay District” late last year after watching blocks of brick rowhouses begin to change with construction that they felt clashed with the historic fabric of the community. Roof decks are banned in the new district, along with certain popular facade wrappers such as vinyl, stucco and horizontal aluminum.

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