Strong Towns by Street and Block

A corner duplex in Oregon. Image via the Sightline Institute’s Missing Middle Library on Flickr.

Many mayors and planners want to strengthen their towns with infill growth without the infrastructure burden that comes along with the suburban development pattern, but they face political obstacles. Residents understandably fight against change if they fear damage to their home or community. Instead of state or federal government intervention proposed by some, there is growing support for a new bottom-up approach: devolving down to very small areas of supplementary power to allow more infill development.

In a new paper I suggest local governments should allow much smaller groups of residents the choice to upzone their own area, within limits, increasing the amount of building allowed under local zoning rules—via a “street vote” of residents of a single street segment, or a “block vote” of residents on a single city block.

The key is to use the strong economic benefits of infill growth to solve political problems by enabling negotiation at highly local levels. Votes by street or by block would give residents a way to agree to share the benefits of new development and ensure it will suit them. 

They should prove a popular means to increase infill development to make more efficient use of infrastructure, by building a broad coalition that shares the benefits of the reform while respecting existing rights and without disrupting existing successful zoning processes.

A New Way Forward: Bottom-Up Zoning

A Seattle triplex. Image via the Sightline Institute’s Missing Middle Library on Flickr.

Homeowners worry about changes to their neighborhoods and about their most expensive asset, their home. They worry about congestion, disruption, and crime, and fear they will lose daylight, parking, beauty, and peace and quiet. The traditional process whereby a city changes its zoning plan attempts to mitigate some of those concerns, but is not designed to address all of them.

Often, proposed zoning changes to allow more infill growth would not benefit most affected residents, for a range of reasons. Each voter who perceives a potential harm, rather than a benefit, from upzoning, increases the political resistance.

If broad upzoning often fails due to that resistance, then the solution is to allow for more localized decision making. Under street votes, cities would allow the registered voters resident on each single length of street between two intersections to choose more intensive zoning by a qualified majority—perhaps 60%. Block votes would do the same for residents on each single city block (surrounded by streets). Different jurisdictions might choose different rules for who is eligible to participate in the street or block vote.

That will give those residents a way to negotiate to share the benefits of new development and ensure it will suit them. To reduce spillover effects on residents of other blocks or streets, the city can restrict the range of available options by setting maximum allowable heights and other limits. Instead of trying to solve everything up front and at once, street and block votes provide a way of getting to a system that produces a solution.

Street and block votes would be a minor supplement to existing zoning procedures, requiring minimal amendments to local law. The goal is to make change as easy and popular as possible. Trials of these bottom-up procedures would not interfere with existing processes to upzone. Any resulting upzoning will be purely additive.

For certain defined areas, each government would simply set out a narrow range of zoning changes from which resident eligible voters who wish to upzone their street block or city block could collectively choose by petition or vote. 

The menu given to the residents might include simply reducing the minimum lot size for single family homes or to allow one or more ADUs per parcel. The most ambitious options might be to allow townhouses or multifamily housing up to five or six floors. Residents who fear deterioration of neighborhood character can pick a more reassuring option, such as townhouses rather than apartment blocks. And residents who wish to avoid changes altogether can choose to adopt none of the proposals.

Even with street and block votes, local governments would still retain full power over zoning, because they would control the options (if any) from which local residents could choose. The benefit of ultralocal zoning is that the city need not choose a single zoning rule for each area, as at present. That will let residents choose win-win outcomes, to solve the political obstacles to more intensive zoning.

Upzoning Springfield 

To see how this would work in practice, consider the fictional town of Springfield, which is frustrated by slow growth. Maintaining the infrastructure of the town’s sprawling suburbs is an increasing challenge. The mayor would like to allow more development to address those problems and increase property tax receipts, but faces too much political resistance. Suburban homeowners, concerned about effects on schools, traffic, and parking, have successfully blocked infill growth in the suburbs.

The city’s planning staff identifies four areas of suburban housing near downtown that would be suitable for gentle densification if the political obstacles could be overcome. They estimate the typical property value could be increased by 75% by allowing either three additional ADUs, replacement townhouses, duplexes, or triplexes on each lot. City attorneys advise that Springfield has power under state law to allow street votes.

The mayor publishes a proposal to allow street votes in each of those suburban areas if there is support in that area. The residents can use a street vote to select one or more options: halving the minimum lot size; allowing up to three additional ADUs per lot; or allowing replacement townhouses, duplexes, or triplexes. They can also opt to halve the existing setback rule from the street. The city publishes a supplemental report illustrating how much value homeowners can add to their properties through each option.

The proposal has safeguards to protect other residents. The pilot suburban area would become a controlled parking district, with free parking stickers for residents and short term stickers for their guests. When each street votes to upzone, it becomes its own separate parking district, with stickers only valid on that street, so more housing on that street will not affect parking on other streets.

Development on each upzoned street will be subject to angled light planes stretching up from the ends of the back yards, to protect homeowners on other streets. Each lot will remain subject to a setback rule and light plane from its boundaries with the adjacent houses, which could be waived by the adjacent homeowner to allow streets of traditional townhouses that would add more value for each owner. Parcels on street corners will remain subject to the old zoning limits until both streets opt to upzone.

The zoning amendment provides that the residents of each street length (“face block”) can opt to upzone by filing a verified petition with signatures of 60% of the resident registered voters on that face block, with power for residents to annex an optional design code to their petition. 

The first area to opt in sees three street votes within the first year. The residents of the first street opt to allow duplexes with an ADU in the long back yards behind. They choose a design code for the fronts facing the street to resemble traditional townhouses. After five years, many of the original homes remain—considerably increased in value by the potential for adding more housing—but the new duplexes blend well into the neighborhood. Property tax receipts from the street have risen, without the need for major road or sewer upgrades. More professionals have moved to Springfield’s growing economy and local schools are not harmed by the organic increase in numbers. Some residents sold after upzoning and used part of their profits to move to another suburban part of Springfield, or to pay for private schooling. Many of the new residents are opting to commute downtown with taxi pooling or scooters and bicycles, so no one has noticed an increase in congestion.

The newly re-elected Mayor decides to allow street votes in more of suburban Springfield, and to give a few areas adjacent to downtown the additional option of five-story apartment buildings, if they wish.

Addressing Concerns

Residents have reasonable concerns about adverse change to their area. Development has spillover effects, not all of them good. Care should be taken to minimize effects on residents outside the street or block. Street votes will require careful rules, as suggested for Springfield above, to address parking, traffic and other effects.

A fourplex in Southeast Portland. Image via the Sightline Institute’s Missing Middle Library on Flickr.

Block votes could be coupled with a requirement that existing building fronts onto the surrounding streets should be retained, so that residents on the surrounding blocks will be unaffected. Light planes could be set to rise at an angle from the surrounding streets, limiting the height of new buildings within the block. 

More ambitiously, a developer who negatively affects an adjoining landowner could be required to pay compensation in a limited range of cases, both for loss of property value and for inconvenience. But such votes will only pass where there is a broad consensus among residents that such upzoning will benefit them. Each homeowner will gain from the increased value of their property due to the upzoning, so compensation may not be needed.

Other spillover effects might be addressed with impact fees, tax increment local transfers, community benefit agreements, and other methods such as auctions—all of which are meant to share any financial benefits from upzonings with relevant neighbors with an eye toward engendering their support.

Many residents will not want to leave the area immediately after upzoning, if ever, so it will be hard to assemble a supermajority for a proposal that would damage the neighborhood. If a proposal seems risky, 60% of residents are unlikely to agree to it, given how concerned homeowners generally are about change. To win a street vote, the advocates will have to pick options and possibly a design code that will clearly make the street better in the eyes of existing residents. Winning proposals will tend to improve their areas.

Why Bottom-Up Infill Zoning Should Strengthen Towns 

The economic benefits from infill growth can be enormous, but current mechanisms to upzone make it all but impossible for residents to negotiate deals that would benefit most of them. But residents who fear upzoning could benefit from bottom-up approaches.

Upzoning just a small area of houses would often substantially increase the values of those properties. Opposition arises because current zoning proposals often leave many homeowners with a risky and unattractive choice. Faced with different options, many might choose to allow controlled change.

Given the choice, many individual landowners would choose to upzone their own lot without changing the zoning of nearby properties, even if more housing might only be added by a subsequent buyer, many years later. Otherwise, there would be no need for zoning rules at all. The same is also true for many groups of a few landowners. But at the scale of hundreds or thousands of landowners—the scale at which zoning decisions are often made—negotiation and agreement becomes much more difficult.

Agreeing to upzone, just like anything else, gets harder as more people are involved: the costs of reaching agreement substantially increase. But it is not necessary to impose upzonings on homeowners. Given the powers to do so easily, many will negotiate among themselves to find upzonings that will suit them. 

Decisions by Streets and Blocks Are Easier

Enthusiasm has been growing for street and block votes since we first proposed them in 2017. Trials have been recommended by economist Tyler Cowen and by the social enterprise Create Streets; as ‘microdemocracy’ by the Royal Town Planning Institute; and in a British Government White Paper. 

Streets and blocks have two main advantages over neighborhoods: they have clear, natural boundaries, and they are smaller. Residents are most affected by activities on their own street. Changes on other streets tend to affect them less. That makes streets natural candidates for modest changes where the spillover effects are mainly contained within that length of street. Streets are a natural unit for housing upkeep and for control of crime. The intersections create two natural endpoints to each segment of street. 

Johnson Cottage via CAST Architecture. Image via the Sightline Institute’s Missing Middle Library on Flickr.

Similarly, if the street frontages of the buildings around all four edges of a city block are preserved unchanged, new development within a city block mainly affects residents within that city block, and not residents of other blocks—particularly if congestion effects are controlled. The streets bordering the block form another natural boundary.

The smaller scale of streets and blocks makes decisions easier. The interests of the residents living next door to one another are more likely to be aligned.  And even when interests are not perfectly aligned, their very small size allows for face-to-face interaction, making negotiation easier, in a way that is not possible in groups of many thousands.

Street and block votes apply the principle of subsidiarity. Decisions by single streets or blocks should also be easier because the interests of the residents are likely to be more similar than across a wider neighborhood.

Many towns facing economic challenges have areas where infill growth would be economic. In areas where house prices are not significantly elevated above build costs, other street-by-street methods for regeneration may be helpful.

Precedents

Street and block votes in this exact form have not yet been implemented, but there is an encouraging range of precedents.

Ronald Oakerson and Jeremy Clifton described the successful efforts of individual streets to rejuvenate themselves to achieve urban regeneration in Buffalo.

In the field of parking, there are many examples of street-level demand for reform. In 1976, San Francisco neighborhoods were given a choice to adopt parking restrictions that allowed residents to buy a sticker to give unlimited right to park. They were so popular that before the department had implemented it in the first neighborhood that petitioned for it, another nine neighborhoods had also filed petitions. A similar opt-in process was used in Austin, Texas whereby the city installed parking meters and ensured that some or all of the revenue from those meters is spent on public services in the metered area. 

Business Improvement Districts are often set up to provide services such as street cleaning and other amenities, often with power to place small additional levies on each business within the BID. By contrast, street and block votes would have no power of compulsion at all. Anyone who does not want to change their property will not be forced to do so.

A six-unit apartment in Oregon. Image via the Sightline Institute’s Missing Middle Library on Flickr.

When Houston sought to lower the minimum lot size in some places, to allow more housing, they also allowed residents of individual blocks, face blocks, or other areas to opt via qualified majority to keep the old larger minimum lot sizes. Unlike the street and block votes proposed in this report, which would allow residents to opt in to more intensive zoning, Houston required residents to opt out. Nolan Gray and Adam Millsap argue that this made passing the reform easier, because dissenting voters knew they could opt out of the reform if they wished.

The Uniform Common Interests Act regulating condominium and HOAs requires an 80% supermajority to terminate an association, which would allow sale and redevelopment. Israel, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada have laws allowing the redevelopment of an apartment block if a qualified majority of the owners votes in favor. 

Before zoning, cities including Chicago adopted “frontage consent rules” prohibiting development unless consent was granted by a specified proportion of the nearby owners or residents. 

Conclusion: A Roadmap for Ultralocal Upzoning

The first step for a mayor interested in ultralocal upzoning is to ask the town’s attorney to determine how to do it under state law. Once that is resolved, the town planner should identify areas of suburban homes with good transport links and existing infrastructure that would be suitable for gentle infill development if the political obstacles can be overcome. The mayor can then ask planning staff to prepare a proposal with upzoning options and safeguarding rules. The example of Springfield above illustrates the mechanism and various options the municipality can offer residents. Planning staff can suggest other options appropriate for each place.

The town can then invite areas to compete to be the first to pilot the approach. Homeowners in the first area will see the largest gains in the value of their property, as they start to meet the demand for more homes. Additional areas can then be added over time.

There is much more detail in this recent paper. If you would like to discuss these ideas, please get in touch.

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About the Author

John Myers is the co-founder of the London YIMBY and YIMBY Alliance campaigns in the UK. You can connect with John on Twitter at @johnrmyers, as well as at @londonyimby and @yimbyalliance.