The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo outlines what SB 50’s defeat in California could mean for housing affordability in the state.
In an era constrained by sustainability and affordability, a big house with a backyard should be a rarity. Much of California is straining under its own success: We have too many people and too few places for them to live, offered at too-high prices, in too many areas touched-by-climate-change-related menaces, like wildfires, all too far from where people work. And the solution is so painfully obvious it feels almost reductive to point it out: Make it legal to build more housing that houses more people.
Increasing density by replacing single-family homes with multifamily ones would be a boon to our efforts to address climate change, and it would help with affordability. But if that is too practical a selling point, let me offer a couple more politically salient ones.
First, there is nothing especially admirable about the development of single-family zoning in America. Though the policy is now defended as a way to maintain the ineffable “local character” of neighborhoods, single-family zoning has a history in segregation. As the historian Richard Rothstein has documented, single-family zoning was one of the many ways white homeowners and politicians kept African-Americans out of suburbs.
And second: We can move on from single-family housing to something better for everyone. A few years ago, shut out of the skyrocketing market for single-family homes in our Northern California suburb, my wife and I bought a townhouse. At first we thought of it as a starter home — we’d just had our second child, and it felt like we could slum it in a townhouse for a bit before we could move into the dream of a place with a backyard.
That dream now looks prohibitive: Houses with backyards in my neck of the woods require tech-I.P.O. levels of insane wealth. But you know what? I don’t feel so bad. Our attached townhouse, on a piece of land a small fraction of the size of a single-family home, is less of a burden on the environment, and it is just the right size for the four of us. It’s also just as loving and pleasant a place for my kids to grow up in as my own suburban manse was for me.
At some point, recently, I realized that I no longer fantasized about ever having a backyard — my dream home is now a townhouse, and if it’s good enough for me, perhaps it could be good enough for others in my state, too.
Read more here.
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