Zoning

Across American suburbs, local governments use zoning laws to require large lot sizes, limit apartment construction, and mandate excessive parking spaces—regulations that effectively price out renters and concentrate them in just a fraction of neighborhoods. These rules operate like an…

America’s housing affordability crisis stems from an unexpected source: minimum lot size requirements. These are local laws that dictate how much land every new home must sit on. When a city says “every new house needs at least half an…

In recent years, pro-housing reformers around the country have successfully changed state and local land use policies to allow greater density on residential lots zoned exclusively for one house. Most of these efforts have focused on adjusting regulations such as…

In addition to the use of zoning regulations to control the location, density, and types of housing, many jurisdictions use similar regulatory tools to limit the total floor space a building can have. These limits, which typically take the form…

While popular scholarship has extensively documented the racially exclusionary effects of low density and single family zoning, particularly in its earliest forms, there is less agreement on whether it was adopted for the explicit purpose of segregating by race and…

Minimum lot size requirements are a common tool used by cities across the United States to ensure that homes are not built on parcels that are deemed aesthetically “too small” for housing. Available evidence suggests that these requirements also drive…