Non-traditional housing: The Missing Middle
If you look at a photograph of virtually any American city’s skyline, you’ll see miles of single family homes in the foreground, then a dramatic rise in building height around downtown, in the only areas without tight restrictions on building code.
By contrast, cities in other countries have a much smoother change in building height, due to the presence of buildings of different sizes, including an in-between size.
This phenomenon, commonly found in American cities, has become known as the “missing middle.” In the United States, when developers build anything other than single family homes, over 40% of the cost is due entirely to regulation. This is why your only choices are to either own a house with a yard, or pay rent forever in a large apartment complex or high-rise tower. There's a distinct lack of townhouses, mid-rise condos, and multi-family houses.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of residential zoning is for single family housing only. It's literally illegal to build anything else, even if the market demands it. As an example, 94% of San Jose's residential land is zoned exclusively for single family housing, and that's a city of 1,000,000 in the San Francisco bay area. Suburbs are even worse. In the image below (of Plano, TX) all the yellow areas are zoned exclusively for single-family housing and nothing else.
If single-family houses were built in such high numbers because the demand is equally high, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. However, a problem occurs when it’s literally illegal to build any other kind of housing, even when there’s demand for it. If given a chance to compete in a free market, traditional mixed-use development would likely be much more common, due to benefits including safety, affordability, convenience, sense of community, and the city’s own financial health. No matter how much any individual might prefer single-family housing, it needs to be justified why it’s illegal to build other types of housing for those who want it.
Developers who want to build condos, townhouses, apartments, and duplexes are afforded only about 5% of available land to work with, and the cost of building them is nearly doubled for pointless reasons. Because so little space is zoned for anything but single-family housing, developers will build the tallest, densest condo towers they can and cram in as many residents as possible in order to maximize revenue on such a limited opportunity.
Recently the only kind of apartments and condos being built are "luxury" apartments, because they have to be rented at high price, and at high volumes, in order to make it worthwhile for the developer. Despite the "luxury" moniker, a lot of corners are cut in construction, because cost needs to be kept to a minimum in order to make a profit.
Ironically, the reason so little land is allocated to anything but single family homes is a bunch of people arguing "I don't want to live in or next to a skyscraper," which is reasonable, but the result is every new condo built is a luxury skyscraper; that's the only way to fit all multi-family housing into only 5% of available land. If not for these regulations, we'd have a bunch of cute townhouses that blend in nicely with any neighborhood, and they'd be more affordable than our current options.
Instead, our only choices are single family houses and luxury apartments, both of which are unaffordable to half the population.
If we're interested in fixing the housing issue, the very first thing we should do is eliminate single family zoning and any fees and regulations against multi-family and mixed-use zoning.
Critically, that doesn't mean eliminating single family housing, only single family zoning. People can still buy single family houses, and developers can still build them, if that's what the market demands. But it's unjustifiable to make it illegal or financially impossible to build anything else.
