As we've followed the efforts of cities and states to pass laws to deal with their housing affordability crises over the past few years, two different trends have emerged. You could call them (as I did in this podcast, among other places) a tinkering approach and a simplifying approach.

The "tinkering" style of legislation seeks to produce more housing of the specific types needed in the specific places it’s most wanted, using, if not surgical precision, at least something like kid-playing-Operation precision. This is accomplished by adding layers of regulation rather than subtracting. Inclusionary zoning falls into this category, as does Seattle's "Urban Villages" policy, and Austin's ill-fated 2018 code overhaul CodeNEXT.

Up until this year, California state senator Scott Wiener's three successive efforts to pass a statewide upzoning bill have epitomized the tinkering approach. Wiener's Senate Bill 827 (SB827) and SB50 would have targeted particular areas in California cities for significant upzoning, requiring cities to allow much more height and density in these locations (but generally not elsewhere). These targets included transit-rich areas, job-rich areas, and areas with excellent schools. On the flip side, communities deemed vulnerable to wildfires were exempted from some requirements, and so were those vulnerable to gentrification.

The result was a convoluted patchwork that, although designed to address the concerns of various groups about getting on board with the bill, failed to muster the support it needed to advance in the legislature. SB50 was fought principally by coalitions of homeowners opposed to more density and rental housing, and by anti-displacement advocates worried about its potential to unleash cataclysmic change on low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Now Wiener has shifted his approach. His new bill, Senate Bill 902, looks a lot more like the successful zoning-reform efforts in the City of Minneapolis (2018) and the State of Oregon (2019). This is to say, it looks a lot more like the simplifying approach. And a lot more like a Strong Towns approach.

CalMatters describes the new bill:

Wiener’s new bill retains one highly controversial proposal: the elimination of single-family only zoning across nearly every neighborhood in California. The new bill would force localities to permit duplexes in neighborhoods where they are currently illegal in cities of less than 10,000 people, triplexes in cities with populations between 10,000 and 50,000, and fourplexes in cities over 50,000. Single-family-only neighborhoods in high fire-risk areas would be exempt. Developers would not be required to build denser structures next to single family homes in these cities — they would simply be allowed to. Homeowners could choose to demolish their property and rebuild it more densely, as long as a renter hasn’t lived there for the past seven years.

Here’s more detail from Curbed and the Los Angeles Times — the latter also points out a couple interesting details:

The bill by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) would allow construction of duplex, triplex and fourplex residential units without additional local government approval in single-family neighborhoods using what’s known as “by-right” provisions of state law…. The new legislation, Senate Bill 902, also seeks to provide incentives for larger cities that are willing to allow 10-unit projects. After a vote by local officials, those zoning efforts would be exempt from additional review under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.

Not a Compromise, but a More Fundamentally Radical Reform—Here's Why

Inspired by the insights of Jane Jacobs about what makes for resilient cities and neighborhoods that can meet the widely varied needs of their inhabitants, Strong Towns has proposed a two-part rule of thumb for what healthy neighborhood change ought to look like:

1. No neighborhood can be exempt from change.

2. No neighborhood should experience sudden, radical change.

This is consistent with how cities largely evolved for centuries, prior to modern zoning and the unprecedented experiment of mass suburbanization. Neighborhoods were eclectic, constantly-evolving mixes of the old and new; no neighborhood was ever "finished" or "built out" or set in stone.

On the flip side, huge leaps in development intensity—the kind where, say, a 10-story tower pops up amid low-rise houses—almost never happened. Such projects were generally not viable. They’re a feature of our suburban-era zoning and planning system, in which most neighborhoods (80-90%) are frozen in regulatory amber, funneling all of a city's demand for new construction to a handful of areas and producing these megaprojects as a consequence.

The bipolar dynamic of modern development patterns—a trickle of investment for most places, a fire hose of investment for a few—is a consequence of our efforts to micromanage where growth is allowed to happen.

Urbanists are largely treating SB 902 as a "light touch" approach to housing production, a compromise that Wiener has resorted to only because his more aggressive efforts fail. In fact, this new approach is more radical in one crucial way. Note here the etymology of the word radical: root. That is, a radical policy is one that goes back to basics.

Allowing the next increment of development, but allowing it everywhere, with few conditions, is a back-to-basics step, a return to a more organic understanding of how cities change. It says that no place is allowed to be "finished" and placed under glass.

We have some outstanding questions about aspects of this legislation and about how it might evolve through the state’s political process. But for now, this seems like a step in the right direction for Senator Wiener and, hopefully, for California.

(Cover photo via Public Domain Pictures.)