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Change is (always) coming! 🆕

Evaluation of public comments re: 'Zone In' this Thursday

Change is (always) coming! 🆕

Phase One of ‘Zone In’ heading to Council

One small piece of the housing puzzle is being address by Columbus this week: corridor zoning. After about two years, depending on how you consider the timeline, the first piece of this major reform is coming to a close. The rezoning of these parcels will dramatically increase the potential of our major corridors to house people and help repopulate the city’s extremely de-populated urban neighborhoods.

Phase Two is likely to be even more contentious, as it will involve “interior” neighborhoods, meaning more solidly residential zones not on major corridors.

The second rezoning phase could increase the housing potential of the city’s most well-resourced neighborhoods, which are also much less (population) dense than in decades past. A fundamental question that must be asked when considering single-family zoning is this: Does allowing only detached single-family homes protect public health and welfare? Or the corollary: Are duplexes and triplexes a threat to public health and welfare?

If you’re reading this, you’re more likely to believe that duplexes are not a danger from which the public must be protected. Questioning the supremacy of exclusively single-family zoning is one of the most foundational components of a pro-housing philosophy.

Other communities are taking note of housing issues too.

Upper Arlington (you read that correctly) recently passed source-of-income protection. Worthington commissioned a housing needs assessment that showed an acute need for lower cost housing and encouraged zoning changes to allow for duplexes, ADUs, and rowhomes. In a deeply connected regional economy, housing opportunity and access cannot only be a Columbus issue.

Council will hold next public hearing for ‘Zone In’ on Thursday evening

Though the official public comment period has closed, a hearing on ‘Zone In’ will be held on Thursday evening. The meeting is an evaluation of public feedback received by council and will be live-streamed as well. To provide written or verbal testimony of under three minutes, email Kevin McCain by 3pm on the day of the hearing with “written testimony” in your email subject line.

When: Thursday, June 27 at 5:30 PM
Where: Columbus City Council, 90 W. Broad St.

Event webpage
Blackmar, E. (1991). Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850. Cornell University Press.

Crisis, control, and corollaries in the ghosts of housing past

The current realities of our housing situation often seem new. The media speaks of a “housing crisis” driven chiefly by a supply shortage. This shortage is often characterized as a result of recent underbuilding. But media headlines throughout the 20th century have consistently proclaimed the existence of a “housing crisis.”

The recurrent framing of the core problem of affordable shelter as one of supply is convenient, since the solution to a supply crisis is not to fundamentally change the relationship our society has with housing provision. It’s simply to build more housing.

However, many issues that often seem new in the media are instead long-standing. Historian Elizabeth Blackmar demonstrates this in her 1991 book, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850. In this work of history, Blackmar traces the social conditions in pre- and post-revolution New York City that resulted from property relations based around earning profit for investors. This includes many topics that are still fresh in housing discussions today, like the negative aspects of concentrated landownership and differences between more ruthless “financialized” landlords and small-scale operators, who “were not likely to take tenants to court, particularly when wage earners’ rents would not cover the court costs” (p. 245).

One critical argument made by property owners in this period was the supposed neutrality of supply and demand.

According to this thinking, a free market doesn’t discriminate. Instead, it sorts through pricing. Under a “neutral market” framework, tenants are assumed to have “choice” when selecting their residential location, failing to acknowledge both the coercive nature of the housing market (in that one must have shelter, unlike many commodities) and the financial limitations placed upon households.

A second key component of the housing discourse was the reliance on the crisis narrative to achieve regulatory reforms.

In the early 1800s, “newspapers, visitors, and residents reported that they city did not have enough housing” (p. 183). The crisis narrative grew by the 1840s, when “the tone of such complaints had gained a new urgency” (p. 183). Despite the crisis, housing developers were not building housing for the lower classes, “because ‘the opinion…long prevailed that such property was unproductive’” (pp. 184-185).

Like today, “builders responded to their own perceptions of the strength of demand—the purchasing power of particular customers for new dwellings…They also decided how much housing of what kind to build and where to build it on the basis of construction costs” (p. 199). In this history we see the mismatch between actually existing demand for shelter and the effective demand that builders, developers, and investors measure when assessing market conditions.

Many of our contemporary housing struggles have direct corollaries in the past.

For one, consider ongoing pressure to unmask hidden shell company LLCs that own housing as an investment. Blackmar highlights an 1867 law which “required landlords and agents to post their names and addresses conspicuously in their buildings” to achieve the same effect of transparency and accountability (p. 264). This raises the question: Why have landlords tried to anonymize themselves for centuries?

When evaluating arguments in the discourse of housing, we should pay keen attention to how these arguments may be new versions of the same old story of housing control borne out in past experiences.

While supply is a critical component of literally housing more people, the role of power and control of housing infrastructure must be duly considered. Housing insecurity has been an endemic feature of our housing provision system, not an intermittent bug.

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