By Martha Sue Hall and Jody McLeod

Over the last several years, policymakers across the country have become fixated on the idea that more dense development and other land-use reforms represents a silver bullet to cure the housing affordability crisis across the United States.

Doing so, they have attempted to turn local governments and their land-use regulations into villains, and homeowners who push back against denser development into even worse.

After nearly a decade of these efforts, most have moved the dial very little when it comes to housing affordability or increased home ownership. 

Perhaps it is time to ask why that is the case, and focus on the real causes and potential solutions when it comes to housing affordability. 

The N.C. League of Municipalities, of which we serve as president and first vice-president, joined with the N.C. Association of County Commissioners two years ago to conduct a survey of local planners focused on residential development. Those survey findings, which can be found in a report at www.nclm.org/legislative-hub/, showed that, overwhelmingly, the state’s fastest growing jurisdictions have already enacted local reforms to allow more density by right, including allowing more accessory dwelling units, sometimes called in-law suites. A large majority have adjusted development reviews to speed up construction, and allow more input from developers and residents as development proceeds.

The same sorts of reforms have occurred in major cities across the country, with Minneapolis among the earliest adopters of density-related housing reforms. Meanwhile, states including Colorado, Oregon and California have taken away local land-use decision-making to establish state mandates requiring more dense development. 

What have they gained from these efforts? 

Depending on the reforms, it appears very little. It is true that some of the state-led efforts are still early in their adoption. Minneapolis is not. 

That city first adopted density-related and other housing reforms in 2009. A study from Pew Trusts, which has heavily advocated for zoning reforms, found those changes had little effect on home ownership and housing affordability. Instead, the most effective Minneapolis policies were those that incentivized rental housing construction and created fewer parking space requirements for rental housing. 

A couple of years ago, researchers at the University of California at Berkley, after sitting down with developers in seven areas of the country, found that changes in density restrictions created little appetite to build more affordable housing. 

In other words, just because you allow it, does not mean builders will build it. 

In North Carolina, we have experienced six decades of tremendous urbanization, as textile and furniture mills closed and agriculture became more mechanized. Jobs have moved to our cities, as technology and professional services jobs grew. People want to live as close as possible to their jobs and close to both the public and private-sector amenities in and around our cities. 

Here and across the country, that demand drives up costs. Between 2012 and 2017, the value of land for single-family housing in the U.S. rose almost four times faster than inflation, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. 

Land costs and how development is financed then play a substantial role in the type of housing built. No one is building inexpensive houses, to be sold at lower price points, on expensive land. 

Meanwhile, zoning and local regulation represent the low-hanging fruit for state policymakers looking to respond to constituent needs. And the homebuilding industry gloms onto those easy, ineffective answers to pursue long-time goals of cookie-cutter development enabled by fewer local regulations. 

NCLM, prior to this legislative session, discussed with legislators and other groups concrete ideas aimed at incentivizing communities and developers to address housing affordability. We had hoped it would be a start to serious discussions.

North Carolina – and the entire country, frankly – needs a complete and careful examination of housing affordability, one that acknowledges the complexities involved and looks at how we might overcome them in long-lasting, meaningful ways. It should involve not just developers, home builders and their surrogates, but also local planners, affordable housing advocates, development financers and transportation officials.  

Without that approach, in another decade, we will be stuck in the same place, asking the same questions, with the same problems. 

Martha Sue Hall is president of the N.C League of Municipalities and mayor pro-tem of the Town of Albemarle; Jody McLeod is first vice president of NCLM and mayor of the Town of Clayton.