Unleash the growth machine!
Cities facing budget crisis need to open their hearts to market-rate housing
I recently got one of my favorite kinds of mail: a notice from the Board of Zoning Adjustment that a nearby property owner wants to change a physical structure on their property and is asking the Board for permission to do so.
The Board, in their wisdom, chooses to consult with neighbors like me, giving us a chance to offer our opinion.
In this specific case, the person in question owns a row house. Behind the row house is a small yard, and behind the small yard is a small garage. It’s a slightly unusual setup in our neighborhood (though, coincidentally, the same as my own), because the garage violates the RF-1 zone’s minimum lot occupancy rules.1 Building a new garage requires either a variance or an existing structure grandfathered in from an earlier era.
At any rate, this person who is not quite my neighbor wants to demolish the garage and replace it with a new garage with a small accessory apartment on top of it.
I told the Board of Zoning Adjustment in my official comment on this matter that of course this should be allowed. But, while it’s not in their power to grant this, I also told them that the city should establish by right everyone’s ability to build a garage, or a garage plus ADU, or an ADU with no garage. There is a particular urgency around this, I think, not only because housing issues are important, but because DC is facing a huge budget crunch this year. The rise of remote work has dealt a big blow to our tax base. And the emergency fiscal assistance provided by the American Rescue Plan was very helpful, but instead of using that as bridge money to enact important reforms, the Council largely spent it imprudently while not thinking too hard about the future. And we are not alone — budget cuts are coming in Denver, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco, as well.
From the standpoint of the overall US economy, a little state and local fiscal austerity is probably not the worst thing in the world. But pro-growth reform is even better. And while there are plenty of cities for whom this won’t work well, there are plenty of cities — like DC — that even post-Covid feature tons of unmet housing demand.
The best thing, by far, that these places can do to alleviate their budget problems is to become dramatically more welcoming to market-rate housing construction.
Killing the growth machine
Before the great wave of NIMBYism that destroyed America swept across the land, Harvey Molotch developed an analysis in “The City as Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.”
The way he saw it, municipal politics was bound to be dominated by a broad coalition of business and labor interests that would always want to err on the side of more real estate development. This was 1976, so naturally he saw this growth machine as a big problem (everyone in the 1970s was extremely weird about economic growth). And eventually, the Molotch analysis proved wrong, because cities instead developed a political economy of localism. The thing about the guy building an ADU a block from me is that the only real downside to this happening is very local — we might have more car traffic on our street. This is not so much of a concern in our neighborhood, but in some other in-demand parts of the city, people might also worry about it exacerbating crowding at the local public school.
These are not crazy concerns.
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