Anti-Snob Land Use Laws, Suburban Exclusion, and Housing Opportunity

ABSTRACT:

Creating housing opportunities in exclusionary suburbs for lower-income households is an essential component of any effort to reduce the concentration of the poor and minorities in central cities. Three New England states have adopted anti-snob land use laws in an effort to promote the development of more affordable housing in the suburbs. Those laws limit the ability of local government to use its power over land use and development permitting to effectively exclude housing that lower-income households can afford. This research describes how those laws relate to other efforts to open the suburbs, how the laws work, and what impact adoption of the laws has had on the supply of affordable housing in exclusionary municipalities.

Notes

1 The approaches discussed in this article are all supply-side efforts to increase the quantity of affordable housing in the suburbs. They do not include demand-side initiatives such as the Housing Choice Voucher program. The effectiveness of demand-side programs may be limited if there is no adequate supply of suitable units to meet the demand.

2 The discussion of the laws is based on the statutes in effect as of the study period, 1994–1998. Since that time, the states have amended the statutes or made changes to the implementing regulations that have changed some aspects of the affordability and exemption criteria, although all three states have rebuffed repeated efforts to gut the laws.

3 The laws do not limit how long the public hearing can remain open, which does allow the local board to extend the permitting period significantly.

4 The disposition of 121 cases is unknown. All of the missing cases were appeals. Forty were withdrawn, and the disposition of 81 is “other” (Krefetz, 2001). She notes that it “is possible, and even likely, that some of the cases … were also settled by a negotiated compromise between the developer and the ZBA [the local board].” (Krefetz, 2001, 401). Even using the total number of applications, at least 73% received permits.

5 The choice of OLS as the analytical method was made after considering alternatives, such as hierarchical linear models and a pooled, cross-sectional time series design. The former was not selected because of the limited number of cases (states) for the higher-level model. The latter was not selected because of the way the data for the number of units was reported. The states only counted and reported units every couple of years, and the states did not report in the same years, and so it was necessary to interpolate to estimate the number of qualified units at the beginning and end of the baseline and study periods. While that is a potential source of error in the OLS analysis, the potential for error would have been even greater if the data were to have been divided into even smaller time periods for the pooled, cross-sectional time series design. All factors considered, OLS seemed the best method for analyzing the data.

6 Because each state has different income levels that it has targeted for preferential treatment under the law, and because each state has different criteria for determining whether a unit qualifies for statutory purposes, the term “qualified units” will be used to refer to housing that qualifies for preferential treatment under the provisions of the applicable law.

7 Not only does excluding municipalities in the New York–Northern New Jersey CMSA help control for regional economic conditions, it renders moot the practical problem of having to decide whether to include all exclusionary municipalities in the CMSA in New York and New Jersey to control for the economic conditions in that CMSA.

8 The attrition from the selection criteria is shown in Table A1 in the appendix.

9 The use of the ratio percentage of single-family units permitted in the jurisdiction to the percentage in the state as a proxy for the restrictiveness of local regulations is based on the premise that most development occurs at near the maximum density and intensity allowed by local regulations, and that affordable housing is more readily provided in multi-family developments. The fact that a jurisdiction permitted relatively higher percentages of single-family units would indicate that local regulations restricted development to that intensity of use, which would tend to reduce the potential for affordable housing being produced.

10 While explicit racial zoning was not allowed for the general public, racial segregation in public housing continued to be accepted policy until at least the 1950s. Even after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, de facto segregation in public housing persisted, and that is now the basis for numerous lawsuits against local public housing authorities and HUD.

11 It is important to realize that the total of national and state government subsidies increased in both the baseline and study periods. This variable indicates how the local level of subsidies increased relative to the increase in the total level of subsidies.

12 More detailed analysis of the data reveals that not all of the increase is attributable to the additional density associated with inclusionary development and qualified affordable housing. The bivariate correlations between the change in population density and four indicators of production during the study period, shown in Table A2 in the appendix, reveal no systematic relationship. The correlation coefficients between higher numbers of qualified affordable housing units permitted and the change in population density were negative.