City to consider ending zoning laws that allow only single-family homes

Staff to study feasibility of permitting fourplexes

OAKLAND >> Oakland is joining other California cities in exploring an end to zoning that allows only single-family housing in many neighborhoods.

The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to direct city staffers to study allowing fourplexes to be built in neighborhoods currently designated just for single houses.

“Laws which allow only for single-family homes in certain areas reduces the housing supply, and worsens the housing crisis and undermines access and affordability,” Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan said in a memo introducing the resolution.

The decision doesn’t commit the city to ending single-family zoning but rather is a first step at exploring its feasibility.

It could take months for the study to be complete, but Planning Director William Gilchrist told the council it’s good timing for the city to explore possible changes and the idea is worth studying because it soon will be time for the planning staff to look at the city’s housing element — the part of Oakland’s general plan that provides a blueprint for housing policies.

District 1 Council member Dan Kalb said he supported the move,

but cautioned that some areas with high fire risk may not be the best place to establish denser neighborhoods. Those areas tend to also not be close to public transit.

“But there a lot of areas where it might make sense, and BART stations would be a first choice,” Kalb said.

The planning staff would study all of that, Kaplan said.

District 6 Council member Loren Taylor said he’d like city staffers to also study the impact of zoning on racial equity.

A two-year study by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute released last summer found that single-family zoning accounts for 84% of the Bay Area’s total residential land and 65% of Oakland’s.

The report’s authors concluded that adding more multiplex housing could be crucial to racial residential integration in the Bay Area. They found that as the proportion of a city’s singlefamily zoning increased, so did the White population, and Black and Latino populations decreased.

City staff’s findings and any recommendation on zoning would be vetted by the Planning Commission and come back to the council.

District 3 Council member Carroll Fife expressed her concern that existing tenants could be displaced by new construction and that the zoning change could spur more market-rate or luxury housing.

Both Fife and Kaplan urged that any changes to zoning include or be balanced with protections to protect tenants from being displaced.

Other cities already have started exploring “upzoning” neighborhoods in this way.

The Berkeley City Council last month voted unanimously to signal its intent to eliminate “exclusionary zoning” and allow multiple housing units in what traditionally have been singlefamily neighborhoods.

More than a century ago, Berkeley became the nation’s first city to ban anything other than single-family homes in a certain area — the Elmwood neighborhood.

Sacramento and San Jose also are considering doing away with single-family zoning.

And state officials have pushed for increased housing production as a way to make housing more affordable. California set a target of 441,000 permits for new homes and apartments in the Bay Area by 2031.