By Lauren Gilger | KJZZ’s The Show
Gilger: The Arizona State legislature passed a law last session that allows some people to build backyard casitas, technically termed auxiliary dwelling units. And it didn’t take long for stories of neighborhood battles to begin. Homeowners devastated that their neighbors are building ADUs overlooking their yards (are) concerned about their property values. It’s all “too close for comfort” as one Valley mom told Arizona’s Family.
It’s a real pain point in communities for some neighbors, but housing advocates and the lawmakers who passed the new regulations did it to ease our state’s ongoing affordable housing crisis. But why does this really seem to touch a nerve for people? I took that question to a big advocate for backyard casitas, Richard Collenberg, he’s Director of housing policy for the Progressive Policy Institute.
Collenberg: Well, people’s homes are extremely important to them and they see it as a place of refuge, a place to go relax and so they care a lot about the environment around them. The other factor here is people are naturally averse to change, worried about what will happen if something in their environment changes. And so, we see massive amounts of resistance to even modest reforms in housing.
Gilger: Yes, and those have happened all over the country, but you also in your work have traced them back to exclusionary and sometimes racist policies in terms of restricted zoning.
Collenberg: Yes. So if you look back at the history of zoning America, it starts out with a benign effort to separate industrial uses from residential uses and that makes sense for people’s health and safety. But quickly it morphed into something much darker. In many cities in the early 20th Century, municipalities adopted racial zoning laws. Under those laws, black people were not allowed by law to move into predominantly-white neighborhoods.
The same arguments that are sometimes used today to preserve zoning laws were used back then, including property values. (In 1911,) the mayor of Baltimore said the reason we need to quarantine black people to keep them separate from white people was to protect the property values of white homeowners.
Gilger: There’s also an irony here, right? Because we see what would often be called NIMBYism, right? In not just conservative places, but often in, as you point out in your work, like some of the most liberal cities in America.
Collenberg: Yes and as a liberal myself, this was a disconcerting finding. But in fact, the research is very, very clear that the worst forms of exclusionary zoning are more prevalent in politically liberal areas. The benign explanation for that is that liberals care about democracy, they care about the environment and so, some of these regulations were put in place to make sure that people had a say in how their community was going to change efforts to protect the environment. But those have really been weaponized in recent years by highly-educated people, many of whom are liberal, to exclude others who are of lesser means. I think that liberals have to, we have to look at ourselves in the mirror on that question and say, is there something really troubling going on with exclusionary zoning?
Gilger: So, that’s really interesting because I’m sure, I mean, I understand the academic kind of reasoning there, but I’m sure you’ve heard this from folks, right? Lots of the people who are mad about their neighbor building a large casita overlooking their backyard would say, I’m not racist and I’m not classist. I just think this is an intrusion. Right? There’s got to be something more on the human level that also seems to happen here.
Collenberg: Absolutely, I think there are reasonable restrictions on what can be built in a particular community and that those restrictions tend to go to issues of scale. How large are the units and are these new units tastefully created or they eyesores? Those kinds of things are all legitimate to discuss and to debate. But too often the aesthetic argument, the argument about neighborhood character is used as an excuse to exclude as well.
Gilger: I wonder, as we’re watching these debates play out across the City of Phoenix, I mean is this just a sticking point in a city’s development? Like in a generation, will this be normal? Have we seen this and the result of it on the other side, in other places.
Collenberg: Yes, I think the current path is unsustainable. Housing has become unaffordable for young people. They’re delaying marriage, delaying family, people who are by all measures, playing by the rules, doing everything that society asks them to are still struggling — and that’s at the middle and upper ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Then because there is not enough housing, we have a terrible challenge with homelessness. That’s not something that anyone in the society should want.
People have to live somewhere and when we restrict the supply of housing artificially, then it drives up the price of housing and everyone suffers. So I think over the long haul, we will see a culture shift. Ironically, it’s not going to be some brave new future. It’s really a return to what American society used to be like.
There used to be great heterogeneity in building types and you had lots of row houses, duplexes and triplexes near single family homes. And so, allowing that diversity of types of home will allow greater economic and racial diversity in a community. I think at the end, everyone will be better off. As I said, change is hard.
In Minneapolis, which is one of the communities that has been the cutting edge of making reform, there was a lot of resistance initially to backyard units, accessory dwelling units. One of the arguments made by a city council member was, “These are going to be houses of prostitution.” Well, that didn’t turn out to be true and so as change came, Minneapolis was willing to make even greater change. They’ve now eliminated the idea of exclusionary single family zoning throughout the city and so you can build a duplex or a triplex anywhere in Minneapolis.
Gilger: That’s really interesting. What about though, when they’re used as short-term rentals, does that do the same thing to alleviate the housing crisis?
Collenberg: There are different uses that have different implications. Again, coming back to the basic notion that people have to live somewhere, the use of a short-term rental has a different meaning than providing someone a more permanent home. But it is a place where people who are looking for a short-term rental will have that possibility and that frees up a different unit somewhere else. So the bigger point is, when you increase supply you will end up with more moderate price increases and that’s good for our society.
Gilger: Alright, we’ll leave it there for now. Richard Collenberg, director of Housing Policy for the Progressive Policy Institute. Author of the book, excluded “House Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See“. Richard, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this.