A provision in President Biden’s American Jobs Plan to make housing more affordable by giving cities incentives to abolish single-family zoning has a number of flaws. Most important, single-family zoning didn’t make housing expensive and abolishing single-family zoning won’t make it more affordable.
To understand this, we have to go back before the invention of single-family zoning when less than 20 percent of urban households owned their own homes. Homeownership rates weren’t low because housing was expensive; in fact, people could buy new homes, complete with indoor plumbing, for $1,000, which is less than $30,000 in today’s money.
The problem with homeownership in 1890 was that people didn’t know what was going to happen to nearby properties. Without zoning, your dream house might end up next door to a brickyard, gravel pit, or some other use that would reduce its property value. Except for those wealthy enough to buy large estates, most people rented so they could move if incompatible uses opened next door.
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