Last night, the Chapel Hill Town Council voted 6-3 to modify the town’s land use management ordinance (LUMO). The big change is to allow by right duplexes and cottage apartments on most of the land that had been zoned as of yesterday morning as detached single family housing only plots. Other chunks of the proposal made it easier for triplexes and quadplexes to be approved in areas that are already zoned for multi-family housing.
The intent of this process change is to modestly (and I mean modestly) increase density and new construction in pre-existing neighborhoods. Most of Chapel Hill once you get more than half a mile from the UNC campus is car dependent suburbia. These neighborhoods have been built during periods of very restrictive and structurally exclusionary zoning which made building with any density difficult. There had been a few windows in the town’s history in the past two generations where some density was temporarily allowed and those periods have created most of the current inventory of not outrageously expensive housing.
The driver of the change is a simple recognition that the town is part of a rapidly growing region. There is massive demand for housing in the greater Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle. Home prices are soaring and a lot of construction is happening in green fields 40 to 60 minutes of daily driving away from the job centers. The new construction in town has mostly been either single family detached housing at a half million or more price points or 5+1 apartment blocks where studio apartments start at $1500/month. The newly allowed housing concepts aims to allow for within neighborhood construction of smaller and more affordable housing units. In Chapel Hill, the limited construction means home prices have sky rocketed. My family bought our home in 2019 in Chapel Hill. We could not afford to buy the same property today even if I was working at my regular salary instead of my grad student stipend.
Will it solve every housing problem in the town?
HELL NO!
Is it a reasonable step in a direction to increase supply and relieve some of the price pressure as well as reduce regional vehicle miles driven on the margin?
HELL YES!
Has it been an ugly ugly fight for a necessary but grossly insufficient step?
YEP!
Is this a political fight that should be taking place in pretty much every town that is home to a flagship state university/med school complex?
INDUBITABLY!
This has been one of the things that I’ve been spending some of my time and attention on besides grad school and instead of health policy writing over the past six months as I think it is important to live our values by changing policy. Zoning determines whether or not diversity and inclusion is a slogan or a reality.
Roger Moore
I think this gets at one of my biggest pet peeves: the attitude that anything short of perfection is a waste of time. I understand the desire for a single step that fixes everything, but most problems simple enough to be managed that way have already been dealt with. That leaves us with difficult problems that require complex, multifaceted solutions. It’s unfortunate, but we have to deal with that reality, not the simple world people want.
PeakVT
Vermont passed a state law this year with similar aims. Among the provisions are duplexes everywhere, triplexs and quadriplexes in areas served by water and sewer. Another provision is this:
It will take a few years to see how that works out in practice, but it’s a good idea.
Ohio Mom
That IS good news. The City of Cincinnati recently made a similar change in zoning law. I know it will be a wait but I am curious to see how successful this effort will be. Probably would have had more momentum before interest rates started to rise.
Nothing gets my goat more than the explosion of $1,500 small “luxury apartments” going up in every neighborhood around me.
What makes them “luxury”? Granite in the kitchen, a glitzy lobby, a so-called gym (a treadmill and a stair master in a mirrored room with poor ventalation, just like you find in a Holiday Inn), and a party room (and I doubt the use of the party room is completely free).
The rent isn’t based on these paltry amenities, the amenities don’t have that much value. The rent is based on the median area income, divided by about a third, divided by twelve.
Divided by a third because someone, somewhere decided that the old rule of thumb, that housing costs should not exceed 25% of your income, wasn’t high enough. And divided by 12 obviously because that’s the number of rental payments in a year.
Never mind that because it’s based on the median, it’s too much for half the population, and the top half, having more money, has many more options, including home ownership (possibly with a smaller monthly payment).
Tom Levenson
David–this strikes home, and I mean right at home. My town, Brookline MA, is in the midst of a similar process, mandated by a new state law that says every community in the Boston area served by mass transit (both the T and the Commuter Rail system) must make zoning changes to permit significant amounts of new housing.
Because of the way the law is written, it may be possible for some towns and cities,* Brookline included technically to comply with the law without incentivizing much if any actual new housing. That’s the fight that’s going on right now in Brookline–with a very powerful group of NIMBYs advancing “solutions” that won’t actually add to our housing stock, and an increasingly effective and well organized YIMBY coalition pushing back (my wife is one of the leaders of that effort).
I hope our YIMBY side wins, of course, but the point of this long preamble is this factoid, turned up for our household by my wife’s work on the issue, is that the 1970s saw restrictive down-zoning in Brookline and in a lot of places around the country.
Why the timing of such constraints on new and more dense construction coincides precisely with that of the Civil Rights movement I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Tom Levenson
@Tom Levenson: To add: I’ve been very happy to see that in some of the cities and towns that have already moved to comply with the new law, the results seem to be emphasizing meaningful, rather than technical compliance, which is to say zoning changes that genuinely create conditions for new housing. So I have hope for our little corner of the Hub of the Universe.
trollhattan
Sounds promising.
Somebody yesterday announced a proposal for nearly 600 units on the property formerly occupied by the corpse of our newspaper, which is at the edge of downtown–a mix of townhouse condos and rental units, with an undetermined # of affordable units. Five stories, which follows the recent trend (just under the height limit allowed for wood framing). Rental construction halted in the Great Recession and we’re way behind, but the city is doing many affirmative things to rectify while the burbs sit on their hands.
Tom Levenson
@Tom Levenson: Forgot to close the asterisk–which was just to say that the town vs. city distinction is meaningful in Massachusetts. Towns have a different governance structure than cities, with a town meeting as the legislature and the select board as the executive; cities have a council and a mayor performing those functions.
In practice that means getting change through a town council is an unwieldy and difficult (easily derailed) process–which is an advantage for NIMBYs. I think we may be able to navigate those shoals this time out, but we won’t know for a while.
Taken4Granite
I have been trying to persuade neighbors in my New Hampshire town that changes along these lines are necessary.
I am hoping that the recently completed revaluation in my town (under New Hampshire law we are required to do this no less often than every five years) will light a fire under some people. Over the last five years residential property values have increased more than 50%, while commercial property values only increased by about 20%. The market is sending a clear signal that there isn’t enough housing available (at least at prices that people of ordinary means can afford). It’s not sustainable to be in a town where most workers cannot afford to live.
twbrandt
Density fights have been happening in Ann Arbor for the two decades+ that I lived there. A2 is a very desirable place to live, but rent and housing costs are through the roof. Quite a few apartment buildings are being built, but not nearly enough to meet demand. Due to zoning restrictions and high land cost, few single-family homes are being built inside the city, although there is quite a bit happening outside the city, causing increased commuting. But NIMBYs jump up and scream about “destroying the character of Ann Arbor” anytime increasing density is discussed.
Good to see Chapel Hill is doing something, as small as it is.
ETA: A lot of effort is around allowing duplexes, triplexes, and quads in areas zoned for single-family, but that really triggers the NIMBYs.
AM in NC
Yes! So necessary around here. Glad to see this step. Local politics is pretty much all land-use issues, and they are dull yet incredibly important issues! Thanks for highlighting this, David.
Kayla Rudbek
My old neighborhood in Minneapolis had a lot of duplexes and small apartment buildings. I always liked them a lot (and I loved the house down the street from us where the entire front yard was trees). Here in the suburbs the houses look so much the same and the HOA is making sure that the townhomes are similar. It’s enough to get a person lost.
Fake Irishman
@twbrandt:
Lived in Ann Arbor for a decade; what you say tracks with my experience.
trollhattan
@Kayla Rudbek:
“The CC&Rs require either Desert Sand or Zuni Putty, and you’ve painted your home taupe.”
“But it’s Desert Taupe.”
“The fine is $100 per day until such time as your home has been restored to one of the approved colors.”
And, scene
BretH
Been looking to relocate to Chapel Hill for a couple years as my mother in law lives there and we would like to move closer to help with aging. Plus wife and I graduated from UNC and like the area. But it has been stunning to see the price increases. Noting-special houses that should go for $250-300k listed for $650 or more. And so many crappy new homes in crappy “new urban” communities all located miles from any amenities.
On a bright note the Stillhouse Nature Preserve expansion is right across the road from the MIL’s house :).
Fake Irishman
Good on you Mr. Anderson.
My own limited activism time budget in Houston has been dedicated to getting the city to implement a key road diet on a local street. We were able to make enough of a ruckus to counter the NIMBYs and give the mayor and council the cover to do what they knew was a the right thing to do. Now we have protected bicycle lanes, pedestrian islands and two lanes of orderly traffic that goes the speed limit and stops for pedestrians instead of four lanes at 40mph.
Houston has also started loosening parking minimums and easing rules for accessory dwelling units and taking other steps for housing.
bk
Carolina alum here, and happy to see this!
Ohio Mom
Putting on my tin hat.
That this is happening in so many places at the same time makes me wonder what is the reason, what/who is behind this. I am too cynical to believe enlightenment is contagious.
I mean, as I said above, I consider this trend good news and very heartening. But what was it said James Bond said about things that happen more than three times?
Jinchi
I’ve been hoping for a housing price collapse for years, and I say that as a homeowner. Like you, I doubt I could afford to buy the modest house I live in, now. It seems well out of range of middle class families in the area looking to buy their own home and it’s hard to believe that the local kids will be able to stay given housing prices. I don’t see how the rapid increases across the country are sustainable.
trollhattan
Sacramento has done this on a case-by-case basis, based in part on the developer’s setting aside a number of units for low-income residents and/or adding studio-size units.
The old parking formulas necessitate either very large footprints or costly belowground parking.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ohio Mom: Sometimes years of advocacy pay off.
ETA: It was actually Goldfinger who said it.
MattF
A ridiculous aggravating factor in my neighborhood (Bethesda MD) is that the urbanized area is merely a postal designation and is governed by the county. So, it is surrounded by a dozen very wealthy suburban ‘towns’ that have money, lawyers, and local political influence that can delay and obstruct nearly indefinitely. They complain about ‘Manhattanization’ when any building over ten stories is proposed.
Jinchi
@Ohio Mom: I think the root cause is the exponential wealth curve in the country today. The wealthy have not only astronomically more money than the middle class, they are significantly richer than they were a couple of decades ago.
Add to that the fact that real estate is considered a solid investment and you get a lot of people with more money than they could ever spend buying up houses and land.
Pre Reagan era tax rates would probably go a long way to solving that problem.
Origuy
@trollhattan: Karla was talking about townhouses, which are attached dwellings. My complex is 60 units divided into four or six homes per building. The HOA handles painting and maintaining the exterior, so all houses naturally will be painted the same color. They’re working on that right now.
I don’t see the same need for detached houses in a neighborhood; a lot of the HOA excesses I hear about are in such neighborhoods. If I had a house on my own lot that didn’t touch anyone else’s, I’d think it was no one else’s business what I painted it.
HOA’s in a townhouse or condo complex are necessary, but they shouldn’t be evil. Too often, though, the only people who want to be on the board are those who want to tell other people what to do. I think a lot of the job of a property manager is restraining them.
Eolirin
@Ohio Mom: I think between the pandemic and going through Trump a lot of people have become much more active politicially, and that’s what’s been missing this whole time. We’ve reached a tipping point of engagement, at least on some issues.
And that’s finally breaking through the obstacles that have stood in the way of making progress on these issues.
Eolirin
@Jinchi: In some cities it’s not even just from wealth in this country! This is a global problem, with economic distortions stemming from it all over the place.
Dorothy A. Winsor
SCOTUS rules against Navajo Nation in water dispute.
Xavier
Same proposal in Albuquerque. I live in an older neighborhood where many auxillary units were built before zoning came in. It definitely makes the neighborhood more diverse and interesting.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dorothy A. Winsor: All four of today’s decisions were pro-federal government. The habeas decision really irked me.
Eric S.
A year ago I bought a home in Albany Park, Chicago. I make a very good salary but still I was only able to afford it is because density is allowed and the fact it is a two-flat.
Dangerman
Sorry for the likely bad news. Trigger warning maybe?
Debris found at Titanic site.
ETA: Tea leaves? It was over quickly.
different-church-lady
Ain’t gonna do much until we regulate flippers and investors out of the market.
trollhattan
@Dangerman: My assumption, especially since learning the Titan had had it’s maximum depth cert lessened to well above the Titanic’s depth, was a catastrophic failure. Guess a fast death is better than a lingering one? Lousy outcome either way.
twbrandt
@different-church-lady: best way to eliminate flippers and investors is to increase supply so those activities aren’t financially viable.
different-church-lady
@twbrandt: That isn’t going to happen, because they’ll just hoover up the increased supply.
Dangerman
Had not heard this previously. If so, shame on, well, all of them. A lot of money was spent searching for Folks that shoulda known better.
twbrandt
@different-church-lady: they can’t buy properties and sit on them forever, at some point they have to sell.
trollhattan
@Dangerman: Yeah, it’s disturbing when the news comes out after the vessel goes missing. A sample story clip:
trollhattan
@twbrandt: Our Fair City has had decrepit property wars with certain “developers” who get into pissing matches and just let their holdings sit and fester. IDK how it pencils out financially, but egos trump (heh) money sometimes. And I’m talking middle of downtown, not merely dead strip malls in decaying inner burbs.
RaflW
It’s amazing how much people fight against the things that would make their neighborhoods better. I was on the community council for my previous Minneapolis neighborhood. That council is, by design, the first stop that developers have to make before going on to the Planning Department (well, typically concurrently in reality since these things take a long time).
Years ago an unsubsidized multistory apartment project was proposed (on a former brownfield) that would include a percentage of affordable units, priced (if memory serves) to be afforded at 60-80% of area median income. Lots of longtime residents were up in arms.
A 30 year homeowner, well known around there, stood up and asked the assembled: How many of you have adult kids who graduated high school but didn’t finish college? Can they afford to move back to this neighborhood? Can they live anywhere near you? 60-80% AMI is your kids! Get over your fear of others. This is about all of us.
It was epic.
Kelly
Oregon now requires cities over 25,000 to allow duplex, triplex and fourplex in single house zones. Cities over 10,000 must allow duplexes in single house zones. Changes took effect last year.
Dangerman
@trollhattan: Interesting. I’m curious how “cyclic fatigue” would present in a vessel that I assume was filament wound. One would think delaminations would be picked up through NDT but … 5 inches of graphite/resin might not be easy to pick up a delam in those circumstances.
ETA: Just guessing, but a propagating crack shoulda easily been picked with skilled NDT but it sounds like the CEO did stuff on the cheap.
Redshift
My hometown of Arlington, VA accomplished a similar thing last year (I think) after a years-long fight, yay! My current county (Fairfax) tried and failed about ten years ago; the county board didn’t seem to anticipate the nimby backlash with much of a plan to explain and sell the idea.
agorabum
Another YIMBY victory, even if just a single battle in a long fight. Every little bit helps.
The next true frontier is letting public entities build and own housing.
Roger Moore
@Tom Levenson:
California has long had exactly the kind of problem you describe. Cities are required to meet requirements to zone for more housing, but they have routinely cheated the requirement by zoning in ways that are unlikely to produce actual housing, e.g. by rezoning a new mall for ultra-dense housing. Governor Newsom is taking this kind of thing seriously by having the state refuse to certify the cities’ housing plans as compliant if the increased zoning is of this type. This has some additional teeth now, because at least in theory cities that aren’t in compliance can’t reject projects that have specified minimum affordable housing levels (20% for low income or 100% for moderate income) even if those proposals couldn’t be approved otherwise.
Miss Bianca
Governor Polis proposed sweeping changes in Colorado land-use law to essentially override the zoning laws for municipalities above a certain population level to make auxiliary dwelling units and multi-unit housing a use by right instead of having to get a special use permit or being banned. Howls of outrage from said municipalities bellowing that it interfered with local control (well, duh – you all have had chances for years to reform your zoning laws and didn’t) and also raising concerns about potential water shortages (which, okay, I can kind of get behind.)
The legislation didn’t ultimately pass, as I recall, but that doesn’t mean the land use reform conversation is over.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep. The actual quote is:
ETA: Goldfinger was using this as his reason for believing Bond was actively on his case. In actual story terms, the first time was happenstance, but the second time was enemy action.
JaneE
I was in college in the middle to late 60’s.
We had a wide range of available housing, depending on how much you had to spend. Converted garages, some even had their own bathrooms. Converted old Victorian style mansions with communal bathrooms. Mostly one room, but sometimes you could get two. More rare were the conversions that put a mini-kitchen in. Even so, for $50/month I had a living area, with gas fireplace for heat, a room that functioned as a hall into the “kitchen” which was wide enough to hold a twin bed, and a kitchen that had a single unit stove, fridge, and sink and a table with 2 chairs. I could even have a guest for dinner. There were 20’s or 30’s vintage apartment buildings, murphy beds for the most part, but pretty spacious and they had their own bathrooms and kitchens, although the single kitchen unit things were pretty common but just bigger. You could get bigger real units with bedrooms if you could afford them, and they started putting up new apartment buildings with mostly studios that were still affordable. All within a half hour drive to campus, many that were a 10 minute walk.
Many if not most of those places are gone now, urban renewed or gobbled up by the campus expanding. The new dorm complex represents what the modern students expect. Clean, each student has their own bedroom with study area for the most part, living area, kitchen and bath are shared within the unit. 2 or 4 or maybe more students per dorm unit. The old room and bath down the hall dorms still exist too, but the oldest dorm when I was there is gone. It was decrepit when I was there.
Some of the residential areas that were there when I was a student have gone to commercial. Others have been torn down and replaced with modern buildings, which are nicer but more costly. When I was there there were a lot of students who just could not live where I and many of my friends did. They had more money than we did. Our housing was adequate. We were dry and warm, or at least not freezing. We had access to toilet facilities, just not all that convenient, and you needed to accommodate the needs of other tenants. Ditto for the kitchen sometimes. You didn’t need a kitchen when you lived on PB&J, and a hot plate would heat cans of chili or soup just fine. Immersion heaters and instant coffee or tea and a package of cookies counted as hospitality for friends.
I would not be surprised if students today had much higher expected living standards than we did then. Certainly the housing that is built today is nothing like what the normal housing was half a century ago. It does cost more, that is certain.
Roger Moore
@Dangerman:
The company swore up and down they could detect delamination using ultrasound, but it sounds like that might not be enough. Everything I’ve read about it says the delamination can happen very fast under stress. If you discover a problem when you’re at depth, you won’t be able to surface fast enough to save yourself.
GoBlueInOak
@Tom Levenson: Good to see what started in the SF Bay Area in the mid-2010s amongst Millenials justifiably shut out of the housing market by prior generations downzonings and quickly spread into YIMBY orgs in similar big city rental markets (Boston, DC, NYC, etc) has now really blossomed into penetrating mainstream discourse and becoming more and more a “normie” position.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/02/rise-of-the-yimbys-angry-millennials-radical-housing-solution
Another positive to come out of it that “housing” generally (much like minimum wage was) was a pretty sleeping corner of the economics profession but the political / public policy salience of the topic has exploded thanks to YIMBYs and there’s been a great explosion in economics papers examining housing supply/zoning/prices over last 5+ years, much of it driven by a younger generation of economists schooled in the digital era of very large datasets.
Build, baby, build.
KBS
Congratulations! We’ve got a YIMBY organization in Champaign working for zoning reform, and it’s exciting to see so many like-minded people across the country winning these fights.
cmorenc
The lessening of CH town zoning restrictions on residential density won’t of itself eliminate any deeded private restrictive covenants already in existence when some neighborhoods were formed (which are particularly more likely to have been created in developments marketed for more affluent buyers), at least not absent state laws overriding them. And unless such overriding state-level provisions are already on the books, the chances of the currently-composed NC legislature passing such are slim to none. Similarly, not sure that the town council can override any HOA restrictions already written into any neighborhood deeds. Not sure how many / how extensive deeded-covenant restricted neighborhoods are in CH.
Not taking away from that the CH council’s move won’t have significant effect, but it’s reach isn’t going to be universal across all in-town land otherwise suitable for residential development.
lurker
so by far the most important thing to note is that it is “indubitably” and not that other thing that was typed. I know that you all appreciate the need to comply with all rules and requirements, be they grammar and spelling or housing and building codes that specify 10 mile setbacks and impossible to find copper granite molybdenum alloy fixtures, door handles, hinges and countertops…
in all seriousness, sounds like a great local victory. we have been seeing some serious attempts by our “pro-business” city council in our sf bay suburb to do better on housing stock over the last ~15 years. Past decisions had been pretty disastrous, including one decision that is little remarked upon but has serious ramifications throughout the tech world…
David Anderson
@cmorenc: You’re right. The HOAs will trump town zoning law without the intervention of the state legislature. And yeah, that effectively means a decent and unknown percentage of the town’s residential lands won’t be eligible for higher density by right. Over the long run, the objective is to get a couple dozen new units per year built out at one or two per neighborhood every few years.