Think twice before you protest new apartments nearby
Phoenix ... can do better. Cities change with their people. It’s about time we rediscover the value of letting the structures within them change too.
My great aunt moved to Phoenix in the 1950s, when it was one-tenth its current size. She settled in Christown, an area once carved from a hay field.
By the 1990s, her sleepy suburban neighborhood was essentially central city adjacent. Conditions had deteriorated. Window bars were a common sight. She suffered break-ins. Eventually, she moved to a retirement community on the ever-moving urban frontier.
With a downtown residential renaissance now taking place, old neighborhoods like hers face pressure to change again. But taking a longer view, change is nothing new.
The neighborhood – like many in Phoenix and other cities – is still zoned only for single family houses, allowing 3.5 to 5 units per acre. These rules impede new building for new kinds of residents, rich or poor, and call to mind a common refrain that helps explain the housing affordability crisis.
That refrain starts with preferences. Of course, residents of Christown and other neighborhoods set in amber via zoning rules don’t want their streets filling up with apartments or potential irritants. They bought into a neighborhood with a certain norm, and it’s their right to enforce it. And if rigid zoning makes homes expensive for the next generation, well, nice things cost money.
And so, when developers have plans for denser, more economical apartment-style housing as our young city keeps changing, residents will undoubtedly organize and object. They will claim today’s structural norm is sacrosanct – the source of neighborhood character.
This supposedly worldly wisdom has no foot in the world at all.
Did freezing the structural form of Christown create socioeconomic stability? Not in the slightest. It’s undergone substantial change, for good and for bad, over the decades, while all those 1,200 square foot homes with car ports and quarter-acre yards stayed the same.
Should the built environment of a city that has grown by 1,000% be set in amber? It should not. Can structural stagnation stop any neighborhood from changing? It cannot.
Does restrictive zoning routinely create value for a neighborhood’s residents? As my aunt’s old neighborhood shows, the outcomes are spotty, at best. Yet a growing body of research shows how these policies block value, growth and opportunity for the next generations who are left with fewer housing options.
Consider Los Angeles and Houston, cities at opposite extremes of American home and rental affordability.
Houston does not depend on zoning, allowing property owners to voluntarily transform single-family homes into rows of townhomes to fit a changing city’s needs. In metro Los Angeles, new housing frequently requires years of red tape. And as we all know, LA’s main source of affordable housing is a U-Haul to Arizona or Texas.
Los Angeles hasn’t become so expensive because zoning rules kept its neighborhoods so much nicer than ours. It’s expensive because, since the mid-1990s, the area has permitted fewer new homes per capita than any other major metro area – including declining rust belt cities.
The worldly refrain fails as a description of history, of process, and of diagnosis. Cities constantly change in practically every way.
Phoenix changes with the daily arrival of families that California won’t build homes for. In Los Angeles, urban zoning and much of the related pleading and negotiation required of builders is a crumbling, failing, malignant bulwark against progress.
Even California’s state government is starting to appreciate the Texas approach. It’s become obvious that its cities’ failure to allow structural
change is the main source of the high cost of living for young families.
The process in the Phoenix metropolitan area is not as bogged down as it is in Los Angeles, but our growth is still too dependent on the expansion of the exurban frontier. A functional, welcoming city must also change within. Phoenix, like most American cities today, can do better.
Cities change with their people. It’s about time we rediscover the value of letting the structures within them change too.
That is a difficult principle that local policymakers will need to grapple with, and it is also a principle for each of us to keep in mind when that angry neighbor shows up at our door with a petition to oppose new apartments down the street.
Gilbert resident Kevin Erdmann is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a libertarian, free-market-oriented think tank. He documents the sources of rising housing costs at kevinerdmann.substack.com. Reach him at kebko@yahoo.com.