Newsletter

🎉 2023 in Review: Neighbors for More Neighbors—Columbus 🎆

We organized, educated, and advocated even more in 2023!

It was another landmark year for housing reform in the U.S. 🏛️

Locally and nationwide, housing reform efforts continued to gain steam in 2023. Issues like parking minimums, single-family zoning, ADUs, and building codes are finally being critically examined in cities across the country as key factors to address our crisis of affordability. While there are too many to list, in 2023 there were significant wins for the pro-housing movement:

Cincinnati legalized Accessory Dwellings Units (ADUs)
Montana passed a bipartisan package of housing reforms included ending discretionary design review and much more
Austin now allows the construction of up to three housing units on almost any parcel in the city
Vermont dropped minimum lot sizes, legalized duplexes and fourplexes, and limited minimum parking requirements
Portland, ME passed a significant package of housing reforms
Durham, NC eliminated minimum parking requirements

We’re hopeful that zoning reform this year in Columbus will make similar policy changes to modernize housing permitting and regulation.

Even more so, we’re hopeful that housing will be recognized as essential regional infrastructure to Central Ohio’s growing economy. Rather than the purview of exclusionary jurisdictions that seek to maintain income purity, housing of all types should be available throughout Central Ohio neighborhoods.

Since our founding in January 2021, N4MN—Columbus has pushed an agenda of supply, stability, and subsidy rather than a sole focus on housing supply.

We care—for example—not only about building more housing, but also about preserving existing units by tightly regulating short-term rentals and reining in the growing problem of investors purchasing single-family homes. In 2024, we’ll continue this broad approach to housing advocacy, education, and organizing.

Sent support letter to protect Darby Creeks

N4MN Columbus urged the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to protect Central Ohio’s waterways by recategorizing the Big and Little Darby Creeks as Outstanding National Resource Waters. We have plenty of space in our cities to welcome new neighbors without building in pristine ecosystems such as the Darby watershed.

Sent letter in support of Columbus City Council's Housing Agenda

In November, we sent a support letter to City Council for housing policy reforms, and recommending focus on three additional areas. We told councilmembers that N4MN was highly supportive of the Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Pilot Program, Vacant and Foreclosure Registry and Rent Increase Notification.
We also urged council to consider three additional issues for Columbus’ housing future:
(1) Increase transparency of individual owners of Limited Liability Corporations
(2) Regulate short-term rentals to prevent loss of critical housing stock
(3) Re-examine the Renter’s Choice (0495-2021) legislation to prevent predatory practices by participating third-party entities

Published eight newsletters and increased subscribers by 22%

That’s about 9,000 words of fresh content for you

Welcomed about 30 folks to our Spring Strategy Session

A fantastic exercise and demonstration of what a bunch of strangers can do with 90 minutes at the public library, the strategy session allowed people interested in N4MN to engage in critical dialogue and offer real-time feedback. Attendees told us to focus on positive messaging, like how N4MN wants to give people more housing options throughout Central Ohio, as well as some other key points:
- Normalizing development
- Recognizing developer size, capital, and political power
- Climate change and benefits of walkable communities
- Housing options for all life stages in every neighborhood
- Linking jobs to housing (e.g. Intel in New Albany)

Offered endorsements for pro-housing candidates

For the first time, N4MN Columbus offered candidate endorsements for a city council race. Two of the three endorsed candidates won their races for Worthington City Council!
- On a related note, pro-housing candidates also won their city council races in Hilliard

Distributed 35 yard signs in one night as a promotional partner with Building Inclusive Communities

At the November event with author Richard Kahlenberg, local housing advocates gathered to listen and discuss his new book, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See.

Added more folks to the ‘Supporters’ page on our website

It’s important to show the many reasons regular people in Central Ohio care about esoteric issues of land use and housing policy. That’s what our Supporters page does—let us know if you’d like to be featured too!

For more detail on these activities, read more on our blog.

Rydin, Y. (2013). The Future of Planning: Beyond Growth Dependence. Policy Press.

With a wide array of communities across the state experiencing growth and decline, urban planning models should be adaptable to a variety of realities—not dependent solely on growth.

And across the nation, four states (MS, IL, WV, and WY) lost population between 2016 and 2021. There must be another way to plan—and achieve planning gain—without relying on the continual growth of private investment. This is the premise of Yvonne Rydin’s 2013 book, The Future of Planning: Beyond Growth Dependence.

Rydin, an urban planning scholar in the UK, isn’t opposed to growth-led planning. On the contrary, in places experiencing growth she recognizes the utility of such an approach to leverage public community gain from the private sector.

She defines growth-led planning as “the reliance on private sector development to generate benefits for the wider community and the use of the planning system to achieve this” (p. 3). If growth is the only path to affecting urban change, however, then effective planning is forever linked to economic cycles and the decisions of private actors.

The provision of housing, a deeply political process, is handled by a market system which cannot meet or assess pressing needs through price signals and information sharing.

Rydin contends that conventional developer-driven planning is resistant to innovation and mired in path-dependencies which place “a risk premium on untried paths,” preferring instead to invest in “established and demonstrated opportunities for reaping profits” (p. 61). Within the paradigm of growth-oriented planning, the consumer-led model of development exerts particular force by “generating new development that meets the demands of those with purchasing power,” leading to a crisis of housing affordability among new housing products (p. 115). The provision of housing, a deeply political process, is handled by a market system which cannot meet or assess pressing needs through price signals and information sharing.

This, she writes, “requires the needs and desires of lower-income communities and the just sustainability agenda to be prioritized…” (p. 201). As a foundation of human flourishing, shelter deserves special consideration rather than standard treatment as a market commodity.

🗞️ Last links of 2023 🏘

Land Value Tax Proposal in Detroit 💰

The City of Detroit is pursuing the adoption of a Land Value Tax, an alternative way to tax land that re-balances tax burden toward unproductive and vacant land. Here’s some recent coverage of this important topic: