Brad Richert

The Case Studies: Does Eliminating Single Family Zoning Actually Work?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve published some article that have appeared to be pretty favourable towards the recent legislation to loosen zoning restrictions in British Columbia. Obviously, I believe in the theory behind the policy. However, this is where I am going to provide a bit more skepticism. British Columbia is not the only place in the world doing this. There are a number of cities, states, and entire countries that are making the move to reverse the century long trend of exclusionary zoning. The results have varied greatly, so let’s take a look.

Uytae Lee explains some of the the logistical and financial hurdles with moving Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing forward

The Movement Against Single Family Home Zoning

I’ve been reading and researching about walkable neighbourhoods now for about 10 years. I fell into this mostly through a combination of travelling to really cool cities, listening to the needs and wants of my clients, and by trying to figure out why Willoughby was being developed so poorly. The last one is what really got me researching about housing reform and walkable neighbourhoods. This was around 2013-2014, the same years that Charles Montgomery’s “Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design” and Leigh Gallagher’s “The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving” were published. I bought both, along side Ken Greenberg’s “Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder” (2011) and Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At a Time” (2012). I was hooked. It was logical and it made sense.

“Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, 1962

Of course, there have always been criticism of suburban sprawl, right from the implementation of single family zoning restriction. In the 1950’s William H. Whyte made the association between the suburbs and the mechanical, routine, corporate “Organization Man”. In 1961, after over a decade of auto-dependence, Lewis Mumford wrote in “The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects”:

On the fringe of mass Suburbia, even the advantages of the primary neighborhood group disappear. The cost of this detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion to its supposed benefits. The end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set…. Untouched by human hand at one end: untouched by human spirit at the other. Does this not explain in some degree the passiveness and docility that has crept into our existence? … Suburbia offers poor facilities for meeting, conversation, collective debate, and common action – it favors silent conformity, not rebellion or counter-attack. So Suburbia has become the favored home of a new kind of absolutism: invisible but all-powerful.

-Lewis Mumford

The second wave of feminism that kicked off in the early/mid 1960’s has its opinion of the faux-sanitized suburban life, as exemplified in Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique”:

When the mystique took over… a new breed of women came to the suburbs. They… were perfectly willing to accept the suburban community as they found it… they were perfectly willing to fill their days with the trivia of housewifery. Women of this kind… refuse to take policy making positions in community organizations… The dimensions of the trap seem physically unalterable, as the busyness that fills the housewife’s day seems inescapably necessary… They give the illusion of more space for less money… There are no true walls or doors; the woman in the beautiful electronic kitchen is never separated from her children. She need never feel alone for a minute, need never be by herself… After all, with no other purpose in her life, if the housework were done in an hour, and the children off to school, the bright, energetic housewife would find the emptiness of her days unbearable.

-Betty Friedman, The Feminine Mystique
The American Dream: A Car, a Smoke and a Suburban home

These sort of social critiques continued to develop through the decades. Almost on cue, as the baby boomers grew up and we saw the next suburban explosion, including rising housing costs, exclusionary zoning became a specified target. Paul Davidoff and Neil Gold, two legal activists, launched an attack in their 1970 “Exclusionary Zoning” article in the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, with a heavy social and racial commentary. The New Jersey Supreme Court rejected exclusionary zoning in a 1975 judgment. Unfortunately, even with that judgement, exclusionary zoning persists throughout the state and the continent to this day.

I could go on and on with the history of critiques of the suburbs and their exclusionary zoning protectionism, but I personally didn’t really see any conversation around such zoning until around 2016-17. Being a child of the 80’s, this was just my perspective, but I also believe it makes sense considering that through this time. Following the 2008 housing collapse, no one was really talking about the high cost of homes until around 2015 when the market heated up again. Housing values had fallen in 2008-2010, but this didn’t make them affordable. But by 2016, real estate values throughout North America and other countries skyrocketed, triggering a wave of media commentary on the relation between single family zoning and housing affordability.

The market had gotten so extreme that by the end of 2017, Business Insider was declaring that the future depends on the outright death of the single family home. In light of political action in Oregon and California in 2019, two authors from the New York Times outlined how communities that were previously entrenched in single family home zoning were starting to reverse course. In a 2020 publication of the Journal of the American Planning Association, three academics stated America’s “unique” way of zoning was the “elephant in the room” when it came to housing affordability. Earlier in 2020, Medium Magazine facilitated a written debated between 14 planners whether or not it is time to end single family zoning. Also in 2020, Charles Marohn, founder of the Strong Towns organization, fought back against his conservative partisan peers in The American Conservative, arguing that opposition to housing reform is showing the lack of true conservative principles in the Republican establishment. In 2021, Vox got in on the action, declaring war on the “racist” exclusionary zoning policies. In 2022, M. Nolan Gray, author of “Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It“, stated matter of factly, in an article in The Atlantic, that “if we want to fix the housing-affordability crisis, segregation, and sprawl, zoning must go. Finally, in 2023, CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn outlined how zoning has essentially been acting as an invisible “tax” on housing for the last century.

So what happens when we bend the code? What happens when cities, states/provinces, countries actually take action and open the doors to small scale multi-unit housing?

The first thing is to understand is that not all legislation is the same. Simple allowing for ADUs (accessory dwelling units) onto single family homes is not really the extend of “un-zoning” that the housing crisis really needs. While many authors might refer to this as a relaxation of “exclusionary zoning”, I will, more or less, ignore such lukewarm efforts, if only because I would like to focus on cases most similar to the legislation that British Columbia is implementing.

Case Study 1: Japan (1968-)

1968 Population: 103,000,000

2023 Population: 123,300,000

2018 Number of homes: 62,410,000

Average Household: <2.0

Density: 338/km2

Japan is easily the longest running case study for non-exclusionary housing, and done in a form that completely ejects the American-style Euclidean zoning that Canada has adopted in the 20th century. This comes from a very different philosophy. Whereas planners in North America must predict land uses in advance with their zoning practices, the Japanese way is to evolve and respond to current uses. Built into this philosophy, therefore, is a flexibility in their 12 zoning categories: instead of excluding uses, they mandate “maximums” for each category.

The “lowest” category in the Japanese land use system is “Category I: exclusively low-rise residential zone”. As you can see from the chart above, this means you can build houses, houses with small office/store space, schools, and religious institutions, & clinics. You will notice that if you look at that “houses” line in the chart, you can ALSO build homes, if you so choose, in every other zone, except “exclusively industrial zone”. So if you want to, you can build a single family home in a commercial zone, industrial zone, or amidst a bunch of towers. And yes, this is a national system. While lesser jurisdictions direct what parts of the cities receive what zoning, they cannot change the zoning.

There are, of course, further directions provided by municipalities that guide the density – it’s not a free for all. I won’t get into the details of this here, but suffice to say, that there is no way for a local government to enforce a zone just for single family homes in Japanese cities. I will post links to more detailed resources on Japanese zoning below.

Above: Select images from land use planning controls for various land use zones in Japan (Hasegawa Tomohiro, Building Control in Japan)

The wonderful thing about having an entire nation that have been using a non-exclusionary zoning system for over 50 years is that there is a lot of data. Unfortunately, the breadth of this timeline also means that there are many other economic variables to consider when comparing. This is beyond the scope of this article. Japan, a G7 nation home to some of the densest cities and most rural lands, has historically not shared the housing crisis seen throughout the rest of the world.

Comparison of housing prices 1995-2016: Japan, Germany and Italy present stable housing

However, since 2015, the historically stable pricing in Japan has succumb to the same global pressures seen throughout the Pacific Rim. Foreign investment, especially from wealthy Taiwanese speculators according to many, has outpaced the usual steady flow of real estate development. This has led some to question the reactive, evolutionary philosophy of the nation’s building style. Yet, in comparison to the surrounding area, even Tokyo, which has seen the greatest housing price increases in the last decade, is still significantly lower than other almost all major cities.

The most obvious conclusion that even a superficial analyses can perceive is that Japan’s evolutionary (and revolutionary) zoning system has historically kept development and prices very stable. Although it cannot, by itself, defend against all macroeconomic forces, it does appear to continue to mitigate some of the extremes seen in other countries, including Canada. However, I must indicate caution when using an entirely different system if we are going to compare to our own elimination of exclusionary zoning. It could rationally be argued that the reason that Japan’s non-exclusionary aspect of its zoning has been successful is because it is built into a much larger non-Euclidean zoning system. The rest of the case studies we will look at below will all be within the traditional North American-style zoning systems.

Further Reading:

Case Study 2: Auckland (2016-)

2016 Population: 1,495,000

2023 Population: 1,693,000

2023 Number of homes: 472,437

Average Household: 3.6

Density: 2,400/km2

Auckland, New Zealand has become the poster child for banning exclusionary zoning. It’s been the model that many politicians in British Columbia are looking at as an example. However, while Auckland’s 2016 legislation is very similar to B.C.’s Housing Bill 44, the situation is not quite as comparable as BC’s lawmakers make it out to be.

The story sounds similar. Between 2009 and 2016, Auckland’s home prices doubled. People were paying money just to rent out garages. So in 2016, Auckland passed a bill to allow for “gentle densification”, so that it would be legal to allow for duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes to be build on single family lots. This is where the success story if often cited: building permits for the city of approximately 1.5 million went from 9,200 in 2015 to 21,301.

However, when you take a closer look at Auckland’s situation, you might find something less spectacular in three ways. First, Auckland had extremely low building permits prior to 2016. Reconsider that 2015 number: 9,200 units for a city of 1.5 million. In 2015, the City of Vancouver had a population of 630,000, yet built 7,993 units. Auckland had been choking its supply much more than most cities prior to 2016. The reality is that through a number of measures, Auckland only just started catching up to regions like the Lower Mainland in recent years. The second fact to consider is that Auckland’s experiment may not really be resulting in any significant growth. Yes, there were more “consents” being issued, but builders weren’t really building more units and the number of demolitions often significantly reduced the number of net new units.

Finally, and this is important for people in BC to consider: detached houses were still a significant portion of Auckland’s new homes in 2023, making up 23% of all new homes. By comparison, single family homes made up 26.8% of new homes in the Township of Langley in 2023, and 25.2% in 2022 – after excluding secondary suites (in 2020, detached homes in the Township made up only 15% of new home completions). Keep in mind: Auckland, NZ is the nations largest city, not just a suburb. In 2022, single family dwellings made up just 5.1% of new homes in the City of Vancouver and 2.3% in Victoria.

Matthew Maltman, One Final Effort

This isn’t to say something isn’t working though. More housing is still more housing and it does take time for homes to be built. Although evidence was slow to come by, it does seem that, at the very least, Auckland’s rental housing market had become more affordable. Matthew Maltman at One Final Effort provides some excellent graphs that show just how much affect the Auckland experiment has had, relative to the capital – Wellington, NZ – and the rest of the country. Some reports provide an even more favourable assessment:

Average rents after inflation in Auckland fell by 2 per cent from 2016 to 2021, and, for those on low incomes, they fell by 6 per cent. In contrast, rents in the rest of New Zealand rose, with Wellington overtaking Auckland as the most expensive city in New Zealand. Likewise,  house prices rose by 70 per cent in the rest of New Zealand over the same time period, but rose by only 20 per cent in Auckland.  

–Anthony Breach (New Zealand shows how planning reform will end Britain’s housing crisis, May 2023)

One major difference that Auckland had in the first five years of their experiment that cities in B.C. wont contend with is that it was limited to one city. When compared with Wellington or the rest of New Zealand, Auckland had created an unequal playing field. It was much easier for developers to upzone properties, which made Auckland a natural draw. This is likely one reason why every graph of building permits shows a significant drop after 2022 – after the entire country followed Auckland’s lead. More on that below.

Case Study 3: Minneapolis (2018-)

2018 Population: 420,500

2023 Population: 418,100

2023 Number of homes: 194,532

Average Household: 2.1

Density: 3,074.21/km2

Heading State-side, Minneapolis was the American trailblazer in 2018 when it announced to become the first North American city to end single family zoning as part of its “Minneapolis 2040 Plan“. Like Auckland before it, Minneapolis council allowed for homeowners of single family lots to upzone to duplexes or triplexes. The road to approval was hardly smooth sailing, with a strong pro-zoning grassroots campaign. The heavily Democrat council eventually adopted an amended motion, reducing the allowed density from fourplexes to triplexes, in a 12-1 vote in October 2019 (there were 12 Democrats and 1 Green on this council, although it was Democrat Council member Linea Palmisan that voted against the plan). It’s important to note that although this particular council was Democrat-dominated, many libertarians and conservatives cheered the victory:

Libertarians were enthusiastic about the Minneapolis plan. Christian Britschgi, writing in the conservative Reason magazine, hailed Minneapolis’s plan as “one of the most deregulatory housing reforms in the country,” an embodiment of “libertarian policies.” “Free marketers should celebrate the vote,” he wrote.103 Rick Varco, the SEIU political director in Minnesota, says he thinks some conservatives would support banning single-family zoning in other cities. “Small government conservatives,” who want to get “the government out of the business of telling people they can’t build,” along with “fiscal conservatives” who want “to grow the tax base,” might support reform of single-family zoning, he said.

-Richard Kahlenberg, How Minneapolis Ended Single-Family Zoning (The Century Foundation, 2019)

This was actually a return to form for Minneapolis, which had previously allowed for such housing types in decades past. At the time of passing, 70% of residential land available in Minneapolis was zoned exclusively for single family homes.

70% of Minneapolis was trapped in single family zoning: New York Times

The plan was implemented in January 2020, so what has happened since? The unique thing about Minneapolis is that it has a twin city: St. Paul. Although 25% smaller, it shares similar demographics and therefore is an interesting comparison.

Similar to Auckland, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul had seen historic low building permits before 2016. This was, of course, due to the 2008 housing collapse and the subsequent slow recovery of the housing market.

Minneapolis had seen record low building permits prior to 2016, Metropolitan Council

So the first assumption we can make is that most cities across the continent, especially in the United States, which was harder hit, witnessed a massive slowdown in building permits between 2008 and 2015. So similar to the Auckland example above, we need to be careful when citing data comparing the slowest period in construction and real estate to an era defined by escalating home prices and increased construction activity.

So while Minneapolis did start posting increased building permit number in the latter half of the decade, as Bloomberg reports:

Unfortunately, evidence thus far points to little progress in achieving any of those goals — at least as a result of this policy. Between 2018 and 2021, according to city data, permits for small apartment buildings doubled, but only to 81 total housing units in those types of structures — a tiny figure in the context of the city’s 180,000 households. 

-Yonah Freemark and Lydia Lo, Effective Zoning Reform Isn’t as Simple as It Seems (Bloomberg, May 2022)

81 units. Freemark and Lo cite the city’s height and unit size restrictions as reasons for the extremely low number of small scale housing builds. However, while Minneapolis’ experiment in the missing middle was an objective failure – at least when it came to increasing housing stock – it was not in a vacuum. The aforementioned Minneapolis 2040 plan did increase overall housing stock on the lower end of the affordability spectrum. In 2015, the city removed parking requirements near frequent transit service and dropped all parking requirements citywide in 2021. 90% of all new builds in Minneapolis in 2020 were in buildings with more than 10 units.

Read more:

Case Study 4: Vancouver (2018-)


2016 Population: 631,486

2021 Population: 662,248

2021 Number of homes: 305,335

Average Household: 2.2

Density: 5,749.9/km2

Did you know Vancouver eliminated single family housing in 2018? Did you know that for half a decade, Vancouverites can build a duplex with separate titles… with a secondary suite in each? In case you’re counting, that’s 4 units. Additionally, for those who choose to build a single family home, homeowners also have the option to building 3 units already, including a secondary suite and a laneway house. In the strongest connection that the province can look to, we have data that shows what might happen to inventory and what the local market might do. Between 2018 and 2021, the City of Vancouver approved 1,055 single family homes and 453 duplexes. That’s an average of 264 single family homes and 113 duplexes per year in the city of over 660,000.

Those in Vancouver who are use to complaining about housing affordability are probably going to be surprised by what I’m going to show next.

It may not be immediately clear, but in January of 2018 (the middle of the graph), the average apartment sale in the City of Vancouver had climbed to $1,123 p/sq.ft. from $772 p/sq.ft. two years earlier. However, 5 years after the essential elimination of single family zoning in Vancouver, the average apartment sale it was “just” $1,082 p/sq.ft. (-3.7%). Sure that’s still high – but we are talking about the center of the world here, right? And it certainly hadn’t gone up. Meanwhile, Coquitlam, which had its Skytrain extension finished in 2016 went from a $650 p/sq.ft. average in January 2018 to $879 p/sq.ft. (+35.2%). Farther out, here at home in Langley – with no Skytrain – we had our average apartment sale increase from $450 p/sq.ft. to $690 p/sq.ft. (+53.3%)! Keep in mind that this does not include any of the off-MLS new condo sales.

Are average dollar figures problematic? Of course. Are there other factors to consider, such as a toll-less bridge expansion or an increase in higher priced new apartments in the suburbs? For sure. Yet the point is less to compare Vancouver with Coquitlam or Langley, but more to show that what people are purchasing is actually around the same dollar amount in Vancouver 5 years later in a region where other prices have increased, despite those cities maybe offering housing stock at a pace greater than Vancouver itself. These are pretty extreme differences accounting for 7,000 to 11,000 sales per year. Perhaps, just perhaps, giving options to people throughout the city has been lessening the demand on pricing in the apartment market without many people realizing it, even with relatively little impact on neighbourhoods.

Former Mayor Kennedy Stewart, I believe, realized it and this was the reason behind his 2021 push to allow for up to six units per lot in select neighbourhoods. In January 2022, Stewart’s council approved a motion for the pilot project to allow for up to six units, and it included a “land lift” component to help mitigate land value increases.

An image of the possibilities allowed under Kennedy’s 2022 “Making Home” housing plan (Patrick Condon, Vancouver’s Big, Promising Step on Affordable Housing, The Tyee)

Over the course of the year, updates from staff on implementing the project were forthcoming, but it certainly seemed to be lined up as an election issue. In October 2022, Kennedy Stewart garnered only 29.48% of the vote to Ken Sim’s 50.96%. Several months into the new term, Mayor Ken Sim’s council listened to a presentation on the plan, received a full report in the summer and then in September 2023, adopted a sweeping reform  that allows 4-6 strata unit multiplexes, or up to 8 market rental units on single lots in RS zoned neighbourhoods, effecting about 60,000 lots.

Obviously with this most recent policy being so recent, there isn’t any current data (in fact, the City of Vancouver hasn’t even updated their website to reflect this approval as of January 2024). It is interesting to note that Ken Sim not only continued along the path of his former rival, but also expanded it.

Further Reading:

Case Study 5: Oregon (2019-)

2019 Population: 4.216 million

2023 Population: 4.233 million

2022 Number of Homes: 1.86 million

Average Household: 2.3 per household

There are two concurrent examples going on in Oregon right now: one is statewide and another is found in Portland. Similar to how Vancouver’s own Charter gives it some additional rights which often sees the City go above and beyond the BC Building Code, Portland too has some unique considerations in comparison to the rest of its state. In regards to small scale multi-unit housing, Portland has a relatively more aggressive stance than the rest of the state.

In 1973, Oregon passed sweeping land use regulations and urban containment boundaries that would prevent the sort of endless sprawl that was happening in California and other states as the baby boomers were starting to raise families and looking for the American Dream on the west coast. In case you think this sounds familiar to British Columbia’s ALR, which was also implemented in 1973, you would be correct.

The problem was, however, that this environmental protection didn’t account for the overwhelming amount of restrictive housing regulations on the municipal levels. So suburban sprawl was relatively contained, but not defeated. Oregon’s single family exclusionary zoning dated back to the dawn of such restrictions in America, but with even more racist implementation than the earliest examples, which eventually led to Oregon being essentially the whitest state in the union. Fast forward to 2019 and Oregon became the first state to remove exclusionary single family zoning.

Under the new bill, cities of more than 1,000 in the Portland metropolitan area and those of more than 25,000 in the rest of the state will have to allow up to fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods. Cities between 10,000 and 25,000 would have to at least allow duplexes.

-Jeff Mapes, Oregon Strikes Exclusive Single-Family Zoning, But Effects May Take Years (OPB, July 2019)

Even in 2019, likely recognizing that Oregon was 140,000 units short of what their housing needs report stated and looking at Minneapolis, it seemed commentators were understanding that nothing was going to happen overnight. There was no “sledgehammer” to housing stock. Even by increasing the allowance to fourplexes (remember, Minneapolis folded under pressure and only allowed triplexes), and the fact that over 70% of homes fell into this allowance, it was doubtful that many of these homes would be densified. However, one important difference is that although the governor was to sign this legislation in 2019, it wouldn’t take effect until June 2021 for smaller cities and June 2022 for larger cities. Although Oregon’s population increased, slightly, between 2019 and 2023, it’s population actually decreased between 2022 and 2023. As of 2023, Oregon has the 5th worse housing shortage record in the United States.

However, Portland moved forward in 2020 and introduced a bylaw allowing for sixplexes as early as 2021. Although praised by many as the most progressive housing reforms in the United States, there were a significant number of restrictions placed on these allowances. These restrictions included limited it to attached units, a maximum 3,500 sq.ft. floorplan, and/or 6,000 sq.ft. for a fourplex or sixplex if half of the homes qualify for “affordable housing”. Accessory Dwelling Units (laneway housing and secondary suites) are also allowed with restrictions.

The results? In 2022, 271 small-scale multi-unit new homes on 81 lots were built in Portland, a city of 635,000. That’s a total number of units… not number of buildings (52 total quadplex buildings). Even with these limited numbers, there were a number of positive results, as reported in the “Residential Infill Project Year One Report” by Cascadia Partners:

  1. Excluding ADUs, middle housing accounts for 73% of the 373 units permitted in the first year.
  2. Fourplex units comprised 76% of all middle housing units in the R2.5, R5 and R7 zones.
  3. Middle housing is a more efficient use of land than houses, achieving 3.4 units versus 1.2 units per lot.
  4. More than 99% of middle housing units had two or more bedrooms, and 24% of units had three or more bedrooms, offering more choices and flexibility for growing or multi-generational households.
  5. ADUs continue to be an important part of the housing mix, equaling middle housing unit production.
  6. Comparing newer homes that met RIP’s adopted floor area size limitations to larger homes built before RIP, these smaller homes were $117,000 less expensive, on average.

Case Study 6: New Zealand (2021-)

2021 Population: 5.123 million

2023 Population: 5.269 million

2022 Number of homes: 2,018,100

Average Household: 2.6

Density: 20 per Km2 

Before I get approach the case study for New Zealand, I do want to briefly take a bit of space here to point to the map of the island nation and its relation to Langley politics. In a seemingly politically-biased report to the Township of Langley council, Director of Community Planning Policy Chan Kooner provided no case studies or comparisons in their report that was intended to consider future ramifications. Over the past decade I have regularly watched staff provide factually incorrect and/or misleading statements to council without anyone fact-checking. Council would rubber stamp decisions allegedly based on this information. Whether or not factual information has been important to Mayor and Council in the past or present is up to the electorate to gauge, but at the very least, it has been discouraging that this practice is typical and persistent.

Councillor Michael Pratt asks Director of Community Planning & Policy about other jurisdictions

When asked by Councillor Michael Pratt whether there was knowledge of other jurisdictions that similar legislation was being implemented, Kooner could only bring up New Zealand. He then went out of his way to express that the Township of Langley has primarily greenfield development as opposed to the brownfield development of other areas of the world. This was an obvious attempt to downplay any comparison between New Zealand and either British Columbia or at least, the Township of Langley. I won’t get into the city planning argument between greenfield and brownfield development at this time, but even just a cursory glance at New Zealand, its cities, its countryside, its suburbs, and its densities will show that that it is not exactly Hong Kong. To imply that no cities, much less most cities, in New Zealand or Minneapolis, or Oregon, do not have ongoing greenfield development to Mayor and Council is not just incorrect, it’s irresponsible. It shows the ongoing willful ignorance by staff and, by extension, council, to make biased decisions without due diligence. For generations, these jurisdictions have been building an inordinate amount of single family homes on greenfield land, which has led to the issues we are now facing.

Above: the suburban town of Rolleston, about 30 mins west of Christchurch, NZ. The first town I glanced at with 5 mins of research just so happens to share similar greenfield suburban sprawl development as the Township of Langley…

Now that I’ve established my ongoing frustration with how the Township of Langley conducts its governance, let’s move on to what’s going on in New Zealand, factually speaking. With over 4 years of data showing a positive trend in combatting high rents in its largest city of Auckland, New Zealand moved forward with the first country-wide ban on single family zoning. In October 2021, New Zealand passed a bill that would require 5 large New Zealand cities to apply “medium density residential standards” to single-family areas by August 2022 (I believe that would be Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton and Tauranga – don’t quote me on that).

Just as Auckland received a lot of press by being a trailblazer for a major city, New Zealand’s experiment is being promoted as the country to look to. As early as 2021, advocates were hoping that B.C. would follow suit as we put a new housing plan into place. What New Zealand did (over the course of 2020 and 2021) was actually a lot more than just ban single family home zoning. As my friends as Strong Towns report:

  • End parking minimums nationwide.
  • Effectively eliminate minimum lot sizes in cities representing most of the country’s population.
  • Effectively end exclusive single-family zoning in those same cities, requiring virtually all residential lots to allow townhomes with up to three units per lot, and up to three stories.
  • Allow six-story development near major transit and job centers.
–Daniel Herriges (What Can We Learn From What New Zealand Just Did?, Strong Towns, January 2022)

There are some significant differences between British Columbia’s legislation and New Zealand, both with consequences that will shape the long term future of both jurisdictions. New Zealand is leaning into a more “human scale” model with its densification around transit centers and more aggressively battling proliferate car dependence and housing costs. It also focused solely on it’s 5 largest cities, with populations ranging from 158,000 to 1.7 million – not the entire country. However, these 5 cities do include 3 million of the almost 5.3 million people in the country. Before looking at what’s happened since July 2022, let’s praise the bipartisanship involved with this decision (something that the BC United under Kevin Falcon were unwilling to do):

Typically, a political party’s housing policies are criticized by the opposing party. However, the original announcement of the Medium Density Residential Standard in October was notable for being bipartisan. The minister for housing, Dr. Megan Woods, shared the podium with members of the opposition National Party when making the announcement, who made their own statements voicing their support. The bill was subsequently passed in December with bipartisan support. 

-Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy, New Zealand’s bipartisan housing reforms offer a model to other countries

Unfortunately, with partisan municipal pushback, the bipartisanship did inevitably breakdown (I know, I was living in a post-partisan utopia for a half minute there too). In fact, it may have been pushback by Auckland and Christchurch city council’s that led to purposeful delays executing the August 2022 deadline. The former delayed their compliance into non-existence and the latter basically said they weren’t going to follow the law. These were powerfully bold stances, considering that the New Zealand government had previously removed councillors in Tauranga City for non-compliance in 2021. Both cities claimed that the fed’s did not give them adequate support on infrastructure and were downloading costs to them. Although the Labour government ended up coming up with a water infrastructure plan, the 2023 local elections saw many anti-development councillors elected. In May 2023, the opposition National Party pulled their support for the policy and proposed a significantly watered-down alternative. In the October 2023 election, the National Party won the federal election.

New Zealand’s 2020 policy is still supported: permitting six storeys close to rapid transit stops, commercial hubs, and city centers in major cities, and the removal of minimum car-parking requirements. However, the implementation of small-scale multi-unit housing is left in limbo.

So amidst all of the political chaos, despite the successes witnessed in Auckland, which actually left any development action in question, what has happened since the December 2021? Take a look:

10 Year Building Consents in New Zealand (Trading Economics)

Since peaking in early 2022, building consents have dropped dramatically to pre-pandemic levels. So have, apparently, the all the articles that have been praising New Zealand’s housing policy, except those that seem to ignore the political reality of the country. With New Zealand’s interest rates rapidly climbing from 0.25% in late 2021 to 5.5% by early 2023, and with no certainty on housing policy, building consents have plummeted.

For those looking to New Zealand for evidence of anything, I see two lessons. The first is that we can only really use Auckland as a legitimate case study for any success of small-scale multi-unit housing. The successes have been minor, primarily because the legislation is, like in Minneapolis, watered down and because there has been interest rates and a political situation in the last two years that have reduced investment in housing. The second lesson that I see in the New Zealand example, which is more subjective, is that partisanship can be destructive to progress and can undo the steps taken.

Further reading:

Case Study 7: California (2022-)

2021 Population: 39,440,000

2023 Population: 39,040,000

2023 Number of homes: 14,707,698

Average Household: 2.65

Density: 668.76 per Km2 

Finally, we can’t have a balanced discussion of non-exclusionary housing reform without discussing California. Prior to finally getting a housing reform bill through in 2021, there were three failed attempts in 2018, 2019 and 2020. As one might imagine, a legislation that took four attempts in four years is probably pretty watered down. Senate Bill 9 (SB9) was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2021, taking effect on January 1, 2022. The revised bill still allowed for fourplexes on most single family lots in the state. However, it came with a lot of provisions that basically halted from any small-scale multi-unit housing from actually being buillt. In the state of 14.7 million households, there were just 282 applications to upzone single family lots to multi unit housing – 211 of these were in Los Angeles alone. Of these 282, only 53 were approved.

Why is this the case? As usual, details matter. Under SB-9, municipalities can keep archaic bylaws that essentially prevent upzoning. For example, height maximums on multifamily buildings in many California cities are actually lower than they are for single family housing. In Beverly Hills you’re allowed to build a multi-family home… up to 14 feet high; yet you can build a single family home up to 55 feet high. This is on top of the state legislated state limitations:

  • Each parcel may not be smaller than forty (40%) percent of the original parcel size
  • Each parcel must be at least one thousand two hundred (1,200) square feet in size unless permitted by local ordinance.
  • The parcel must also be limited to residential use.
  • Assembling a neighboring parcel or collaborating with a neighbor to split an adjacent lot is not allowed.
  • The applicant must also provide an affidavit that the applicant intends to use one of the housing units as a principal residence for at least three (3) years from the date of approval.
  • The property should not be in a historically designated zone and should avoid high-risk areas like fire-prone zones, floodplains, or earthquake fault zones.
  • The existing property on the parcel must not have any form of rent or price control in place.
  • The property cannot currently have a tenant living there in the past three years, nor can it have been subject to an Elis Act eviction within the last 15 years.
  • No HOA that has practically prohibited the use of SB9.
  • Parcels must be situated in urban areas.

So while, yes, small-scale multi-unit housing up to 4 units is allowed in California, it simply isn’t feasible to actually build them. In a way, California only got this bill passed to let the municipalities decide what they want to do, which is essentially how zoning has worked in North America anyway.

Above: Single Family Home Zoning has locked away the vast majority of land in San Jose (94%), Los Angeles (75%) and Sacramento (77%) (Emily Badger & Quoctrung Bui, Cities Start to Question an American Ideal: A House With a Yard on Every Lot, New York Times, June 2019)

Other than the numbers that show failure of the statewide system to actually produce an increase in housing via SB9, this isn’t to say that California isn’t increasing the housing stock or that certain cities aren’t moving forward with allowing for more small-scale multi-unit housing. Since their allowance in 2018, there have been 45,000 accessory dwelling units (ADUs) built and a 2017 bill that fast tracked apartment and townhome permits have helped build approximately 54,000 new multifamily units in 2022, an increase of 4% over 2021. In fact, 2022 had more homes built than any year since the 2008 housing collapse. Of course, this is California so 54% of new homes were still single family detached homes. However, in the first half of 2023, which was a slower season due to interest rates, multifamily housing was only down by 1%, whereas new single family housing permits were down by 14%.

Still, while cities like Sacramento and Berkeley attempt to pass more flexible bills, movement is tepid, with purposeful delays in implementation. Without stronger state intervention, it may be years before any real housing reform comes to Californian cities.

Further Reading:

Conclusion

Two weeks ago, I outlined the usual arguments for eliminating exclusionary single family home zoning. Last week, I showed what the BC government was proposing and dispelled some myths and misrepresentations. In both, it is apparent that I am quite in favour of the legislation. Yet I made allusions to my skepticism of the efficacy of the legislation. The case studies that I have provided above show various levels of success and failure, but there are some commonalities.

Does eliminating single family home zoning work? The question is obviously clickbait, since it assumes (1) we agree on what the intended outcome will be and (2) whether or not that outcome is positive (or, of course that you already vehemently disagree – yet if you’ve come this far in this 6,000 word essay, kudos).

What we don’t see is an oversaturation of building following any legislation that eliminates single family zoning. If anything, it is a process that is slow to react to market conditions. Economic realities and detailed zoning restrictions do not favour the mass production of small-scale multi-unit housing in North America. From Oregon to Vancouver to Minneapolis, it just doesn’t make sense to pay a significant sum for a single family home lot to build a multiplex on speculation.

Since we don’t see this sort of legislation helping the supply side of housing in any substantial way, then we won’t really see it help affordability – at least not in the short term. As we see with longer term examples in Japan, Auckland, and perhaps a neighbourhood I didn’t cover, such as Port Chester, NY (see below), there is a generational value to increased flexibility. This could be in the form of more walkable neighbourhoods, less traffic, more affordable homes, greater socio-economic equality, more vibrant downtowns, and/or more resilient cities.

It takes time for cities and their population to adapt. Real estate development is a risk-mitigating industry. Why build something different that is untested when you know what you can make profit quick and easy on? Innovative politicians often find themselves needing to trudge slowly along as the paradigms of their electorate shift. Those with stronger ideologies may face the consequences of moving faster than their populace desire and the backlash can often undo any progress made.

Other Zoning Reforms

More in this Series:

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