This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. It is co-published here with permission.
The classic American ideal of a single-family home surrounded by a green lawn and picket fence may no longer be sustainable in California. Today, most of the state’s residential land—more than two-thirds of it—is set aside exclusively for one home per lot. The practice may not only have driven up land prices, it has also created intense racial and economic segregation. Single family zoning is the “new redlining,” wrote Richard Kahlenberg in a New York Times op-ed earlier this year. Scholarly work on the exclusionary effect the practice has had in U.S. cities has recently come to public attention.
Now, California’s legislative leadership hopes to allow up to four homes on a single lot without local government approval. The state would become the second to do away with single family-only zoning. More homes on less land—at least in theory—could lead to more homes that more Californians could afford. Oregon eliminated single family zoning in larger cities in 2019. The city of Minneapolis did so the year before, and Berkeley and Sacramento have also moved to bar the practice.
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