This 100-Year-Old Law Is Choking America's Housing Supply

[00:00:00] Hey Vodafone, ich weiß ja, schnelles Internet für meinen Betrieb hat seinen Preis. Nö, bei uns nur den halben. Wie wär's zum Beispiel mit bis zu 1000 Mbit pro Sekunde für nur 29,95 Euro im Monat? Die Firma dankt. Und die Fritzbox gibt's gratis dazu. Passt? Deal. Jetzt 50% auf Ihren Business-Kabel-Internet-Tarif sparen. Im Shop oder auf vodafone.de slash business.

[00:00:24] What if I told you that a 100-Year-Old Law was responsible for your high rent? In this podcast, you'll learn why as we talk about an expert that's dug deep into this subject. So today on the show, we have Sarah Bronin, who is a zoning expert. Yeah, I sought her out. I know many people might think this is a boring subject, but I'll tell you what. This is a 100-Year-Old Law that's keeping rents high.

[00:00:49] Yeah, and it's really interesting how she breaks it down and really helps to understand, you know, what needs to be changed in zoning in order to actually build affordable housing. This is the biggest obstacle for builders. Yeah, because builders, you know, people, that's always the biggest question is like, why don't they build more affordable housing? Well, a lot of it has to do with zoning. Well, the rules are there and they're hard to navigate. And there are rules that you do have to listen to, unfortunately. So it's going to be good. You guys listen in.

[00:01:17] What do you see as the most urgent zoning reforms needed to improve housing affordability? Oh, thanks for the question. And, you know, thanks for having me. I think in general, for developers, for communities, for people who need housing and need places to open their businesses, the most important thing for zoning is probably clarity.

[00:01:41] Clear rules that allow people to understand how zoning works and what they're allowed to do with their properties. An example of this, I guess, in the housing context might be the list of things that somebody who wants to build an apartment building has to do before they'll get permitted. But to say that as long as you do those things, you'll get the zoning permit.

[00:02:06] We call that as of right development, development that doesn't require public hearings, something that can be approved through a checklist that staff can review. That, to me, would be a really significant reform for housing. But also, just generally speaking, we need zoning codes that are much clearer and more straightforward to understand, because right now they're a bit of a mess.

[00:02:33] Let's back up just a little bit and talk about zoning itself, because I think it's one of those, you know, it's kind of a, it's kind of a, they're hidden rules, right? Like they've been on the books forever. And so maybe we could just give an overview because I think, for example, you know, as an apartment developer, there are cities that have height requirements. They have setbacks. They have parking requirements, which I really want to dig in with you because parking requirements.

[00:03:03] I did cite that issue up in Sandpoint with that, that you noted as well. You know, I have a home, we have a home up in Coeur d'Alene. We've been to Sandpoint a lot. I know that I think it was called Monarch Coffee that they were going to rip down in the middle of town. And so there's all these things around zoning that can eliminate historical areas. And, and, you know, for what I would call old laws and old policies on the books.

[00:03:31] I think you're a hundred percent right, Ken. I mean, the idea of zoning first came about a hundred years ago. And we actually had a federal government agency, the Department of Commerce, promoting the idea of zoning on the basis that if we had zoning, it might help to promote economic growth, might order our communities, might give people a better sense.

[00:03:55] Actually, the word morals is used in many state statutes to promote morals and morality, I guess. But zoning really evolved, I would say, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, but especially in the 50s and 60s to be adopted at the local level and to kind of have this overall view of a couple things.

[00:04:21] One, that residential uses had to be separated from everything else, and especially the single family zone. But second, that the car had to be an important part of American development. And you see that, you mentioned parking mandates. You see that in the size of our lots that are required by zoning.

[00:04:42] You see that in the things that communities allow, probably in places that they shouldn't, gas stations in some neighborhoods, historic neighborhoods even, that probably shouldn't be seeing that kind of development. So you see the rise of the automobile. And since the 50s and 60s, by which point most American cities have adopted zoning, you actually don't see a lot of change.

[00:05:09] So your comment that zoning codes are outdated, that is very, very true. And we are seeing that in zoning codes, we're reading across the country through a project they have called the National Zoning Atlas, where we're just reading code after code and putting information to the map. We are seeing that car-oriented nature. We're seeing the separation of uses. And it's everywhere. Yeah. And I'll just give everybody just a couple examples.

[00:05:37] So we're in the apartment development business. And if I'm building a 200-unit project, I, in many cities, have to have 400 parking spaces. So two per apartment, as an example. And so you have to design that in. And so all of a sudden, that might make, because of the size restriction of the land, it might make us be able to only build 160 units or 150 units.

[00:06:02] And, of course, now all of a sudden, because I'm taking so much away from parking and height, you know, in other words, I can't go more than two stories or whatever. And so what actually happens is, as a developer, our hands are often tied, kind of what Sarah was talking about earlier. And so now we're building less units on the land that we probably could have.

[00:06:24] And so this is a direct hit to affordable housing, because if we could build smaller units, more units on a site, then there would be more choices for the consumer. Rents would come down. There'd be more options, just like anything. And so zoning is a big deal when it comes to affordable housing. I know we're going to get there, but I wanted to give everybody kind of a practical analysis of exactly what we go through, because we'll tie up a piece of land.

[00:06:54] And oftentimes we can't build on it, you know, because of all the restrictions the city or the county has. We have to back away and move on. And so this is a big issue for moving forward. I don't know what this administration is going to do, but if we could relax zoning a little bit through some kind of process. Obviously, you need to have that. But we could add a lot more housing on the same amount of land.

[00:07:21] So in the book, I do talk about many of the things that you mentioned. So minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, setbacks. But there are even more that we've seen really across zoning codes. You mentioned height caps as well. We've seen restrictions on the number of units that can be put in a building. We've seen lot coverage caps, meaning how big you can build the building on a lot. Sometimes as little as 10 percent of a lot can be the building.

[00:07:51] And then what do you do with 90 percent? Maybe are you putting parking on it? Are you putting a park on it? What's going on? But it constrains the size of the building. We've seen minimum unit sizes. So if there's an apartment building that's going up, the zoning code will say, and we've seen zoning codes that say every apartment has to be 2,000 square feet. Right. Yeah. If you're a developer, you're building studio apartments that are 2,000 square feet.

[00:08:19] You know, I mean, at what point does it become an excessive burden, a burden that's imposed through zoning on housing? So I am 100 percent with you, and that's kind of going back to what I was saying earlier, which is it's the simplicity. It's not having all of these sort of rules that somebody said at some point in time in the distant past, oh, this would be a really good idea to have this rule. And nowadays we look at that and say, why is that even there in the first place? What purpose does it serve?

[00:08:46] And that's what I think I wanted my book to bring to readers, to have them question zoning. What purpose are these provisions serving? And then to see maybe the unintended consequences of some zoning provisions. Why do you think that there's so much resistance to change these, you know, zoning laws? Because, you know, if they are so out of date, then why wouldn't city officials move to change those?

[00:09:09] I think people, so zoning is by and large enacted at the local level by local elected officials. I think if you're a mayor or city council member, your expertise is probably not zoning. Maybe in the rare circumstance, you might be the planner that ran for office. But in most cases, you might be a business person. You might be a mom that was on the school board that decided, OK, I'm going to be on the city council.

[00:09:37] Your expertise may or may not be zoning. And so to look at a zoning code that's already 200, 300 pages long as an elected official with a huge range of issues, you might look at that and say, I'm not touching that. I'm not going to like, I don't know. I don't know what the different changes might be that I need to make. I don't know how to sort of engage with this document. And I don't know what can of worms I'm going to open up in my two year term, in my four year term in this position to make the change.

[00:10:07] So part of it's the fact that people cannot, including our elected officials that are responsible for zoning, they can't access zoning. They don't know what the different levers are. They don't know if they pulled this one, something else is going to happen on the back end. And they may not really want to get the political pushback from a residence perspective. That's what we see most of the pushback.

[00:10:29] People who have purchased a home in particular, the home voters, what sociologists and economists call them, the home voters want certainty. They don't want change to the status quo. Any change to the status quo will upend their expectations about what their community was supposed to be. And that's that's that's that causes fear. It causes consternation. So I think that it's a bit of fear.

[00:10:58] It's a bit of lack of knowledge, maybe about the zoning's particulars, but it's just a general lack of a connection with the ability to engage with the documents themselves. Zoning is complicated and most people appreciate that and don't want to have anything to do with it. That's why these rules stay in place for as long as they do. Do you think in order to fix it that it needs to move to a state or national level then? We have seen a large number of statewide zoning reforms.

[00:11:26] So it's if you think about this way, it's the states and the state legislatures that give local governments the power to zone in the first place. It's the states that write the rules as to how they can exercise how local governments can exercise their zoning authority. So thinking about that that dynamic, you have seen state legislatures come back and say, wait a minute, we didn't expect for you guys to do this.

[00:11:53] So they override or guide local governments to do something different. You've seen that in Massachusetts, which passed a law that required local governments with train stations to rezone for more density around those train stations.

[00:12:09] You've seen it in Montana, which requires local governments to up zone now to six units in some neighborhoods, going from one to some reforms a few years ago that said two to four and now they're going to six. So the state legislatures have kind of had it in some states with local governments being too slow to change.

[00:12:30] So I do think that that is a current sort of move that's happening across the country in red states, blue states alike. I just mentioned in California is doing a lot. Connecticut, all the states are across the political spectrum. So I wanted to chat with you about the NIMBY, you know, we'll stick with that. Yeah. So I think NIMBY, you know, not in my backyard is is a real issue. Right.

[00:12:58] So these these a lot of times these politicians are in office and you kind of said it. There's a massive need for affordability. Right. But at the same token, most of those communities don't really want it. We've seen some 80 use or accessible dwelling unit laws even passed recently in Seattle and Scottsdale and Austin. But they're kind of slow playing, you know, letting them even be built.

[00:13:26] So they're being passed from an optics level politically. But, you know, we're seeing, you know, the process being being very, very difficult. You know, is this a is this a branding issue, a marketing issue, an education issue? You know, what do you think? I mean, it may be all of those, but I think it goes back to the general the general notion that people don't don't like change and they don't like conflict.

[00:13:53] And in many cases, when you raise the issue of zoning or you raise the issue of an application that would be different than what's in the community, an application for multifamily housing, say, in an area that's predominantly single family housing. People don't like that. Don't like that. It's it's it's it's it causes some uncertainty.

[00:14:15] I think the way to combat it, though, is to show how successful some communities have been in in making those changes, whether it's iteratively through, you said, accessory dwelling units, legalizing those. And for folks who don't know, those are these smaller units that might be on a third story or might be in a garage or might be in a basement where a second household can live on the same lot as a single family home. So basically a small unit of housing.

[00:14:44] So whether it's incremental, like adding that or doing something like Minneapolis is done and allow for two, three and four family housing and single family neighborhoods. Again, that that's what people call gentle density. And you've seen some cities take that route. As I mentioned, you see some states take that that route as well. So, and I think, too, when you have the word affordable, you know, I think people link everything back to like Section 8, right?

[00:15:14] Like they think, you know, it has to be a bad, you know, a bad thing to have affordable housing in their neighborhood. And I think that's part of it, too, because a lot of it's workforce housing. It's teachers. It's police officers. It's people that do these everyday jobs that the community needs. It's housing for them. It's not necessarily going to cause all these problems or be free housing or even subsidized housing. It's just more affordable for people that make an average salary. Yeah, and affordability is relative to people's income.

[00:15:43] So, you know, people, the rule of thumb, as you know, is that if you're spending more than 30% of your income on housing, then your housing is not affordable. And so when you're talking about affordability, you're looking at individuals and individual households' income relative to the cost that they're spending on housing. And that's, I think, what people need to understand. Housing can be unaffordable to somebody that we might consider to be in the middle income bracket.

[00:16:11] Because they're paying more than 30% of their income on housing. And that's the only thing that they can find in a region. That's still unaffordable, even though we're not necessarily talking about a very low-income household. So I'd like to talk to you about best practices. You know, I know in your book, I think you talked about Tucson being one. We're in Arizona, and we have a lot of property in Tucson.

[00:16:35] And they have down there the CCT or the Community Corridor Tool that kind of gives the local authorities the flexibility to work within stuff and preserve things. What are some best practices that you've seen around the country? You know, as you were writing this book, I'm sure, because I think if we could just bring awareness to that. Because to your point, if there was something that highlighted best practices, I think that, you know, people would pick up on this quicker.

[00:17:04] Because affordability is probably the biggest issue we face. We can't build affordable, personally. I wish I could, but I can't. Because by the time, you know, the zoning and all the setbacks and all the stuff, and of course the cost of the actual construction itself plus the debt, it's very, very difficult to deliver any kind of affordable housing today. And so we do need, you know, that public-private partnership role.

[00:17:32] We need that engaged in order to deliver this stuff. I mean, in terms of best practices, the reason I brought up Tucson in the book is because Tucson has landscape provisions in its zoning code. For folks who don't know, Tucson is in the midst of the Sonoran Desert. It is hot, arid desert conditions. And it has provisions of the zoning code that say you're designing your front yards with the environment.

[00:18:01] You're not putting shrubs that need a lot of water. You're putting in xeriscaping. You're putting in rock formations and cacti. But you're, and to me, that's a zoning code provision that is a best practice in this area of designing with the environment.

[00:18:20] Which, by the way, is more economical over the long term for the property owner because you're not out there basically watering with dollar bills your front yard. You're, you created this, this sustainable from an economic standpoint and environmental standpoint ecosystem within the city limits. So this is not just an outlying area. This is within the city limits.

[00:18:44] So I think more broadly, best practices in terms of economic growth, in terms of mixed use development. I include a few of those in the book. And I think what you're most interested in, I think personally, may be housing. And for me, the best practice in housing is to reduce the process requirements that go along with housing.

[00:19:09] So to make housing development as of right, without public hearings, for each of those individual applications that get those folks you called NIMBYs, and many people call them that, that come and protest any new development. To get them out of the development process by putting all of the rules of the game clearly in the code at the outset. That, to me, is the best practice. Where that's been done is the place actually that I served as planning and zoning commission chair for seven years.

[00:19:39] Hartford, Connecticut has all of its housing as of right. We also enacted a form-based code that clearly lays out the kind of development that can be built. And the rule is, if you have a place that looks like this, that meets the form-based code and the other development requirements, you get a permit. And that's the way it is. We don't have minimum lot sizes for residential in Hartford.

[00:20:02] We just have stripped away many of those unnecessary constraints on development in a place at Hartford specifically that needs new development. So we need to make it easy for people to bring in new neighbors, to bring in new taxpayers, and to help to enliven that city.

[00:20:23] Well, and I want to dig into parking just a little bit because, you know, my parents bought a home years ago that had basically a driveway. And then there was a single-car garage, and then it went to a double-car garage. Now people are building three- and four- and five-car garages. But that's actually reversing as we're starting to see with, you know, obviously we have the Waymos out here. We have, you know, the driverless stuff.

[00:20:50] And I think you're starting to see also the costs of people with the vehicles themselves, you know. But to your point, we still have a lot of those parking requirements in some of these downtown areas, you know. And it just blows my mind because when you go on the edge of town, of course, where there's plenty of land, it's really not a big deal.

[00:21:12] But when you're trying to, you know, maximize the density in, let's say, in an urban core, in the infill, which is really what I think we should be focusing on is keeping things, you know, on the infill side. Those parking requirements most of the time kill a deal. Literally, it could be the difference of a go or no go. So can you go talk a little bit about that? I know you talk about this in the book, and I think it's that's one of the biggest outdated issues.

[00:21:42] And thankfully, we're going the other direction with cars. You know, you say that. And I'll also just add to your list of changing statistics that millennials and these young people, they do not want to drive. And if it's not even just it's a matter of an active choice, they're not getting their driver's licenses. They do not want to drive. They'd rather take an Uber, you know, fingers crossed.

[00:22:05] They might start taking these if they turn out to be OK, these automated vehicles like Waymo. I'm personally, I don't know if I would drive in a driverless car, but but I don't know. Let's see. I know they're testing and they're testing it out in Arizona and some places. So so keep us posted on how that's going. But the parking mandates.

[00:22:28] Yeah, it's just a very outdated 1950s, 1960s era vestige of this idea that for Americans, the American dream is the open road, the car, the single family house, the two car garage and then, you know, sort of nuclear family. It's just not the way Americans live right now. But yet our land use codes have not caught up.

[00:22:51] It's worst, though, in those cities that have dense, dense urban developments already. And yet they still impose parking minimums because it's in cities where you really should be just if the developer wants to build it. Great. Because they know that they'll their tenants or their their buyers will need it. But if not, let's not make that make that investment, because if you make it easy for people to park, they're more likely to drive.

[00:23:20] But again, but then at the outset, I mean, the other issue, it drives up the costs of whatever the development, residential or otherwise. So I have been partnered with the parking reform network. We eliminated minimum parking requirements in Hartford, the first city in the country to do so on a citywide basis. By the way, Buffalo was up there, too. They eliminated parking mandates for developments under a certain size.

[00:23:47] But you do see these post-industrial cities that are trying to take the lead. And I would, again, put Hartford in that camp. What was I going to say about parking? Just last thing, you know, definitely in central cities, but really anywhere. You don't need parking in a suburban area, too. When I was, I helped to build the largest apartment building in Connecticut, actually, in downtown New Haven. And it was a 400-unit building.

[00:24:17] And we were required by the city to build 500 parking spaces. This is on a one-acre lot in downtown New Haven, across the street from a train station. Yeah. And one block away from the New Haven Green. And we were required to build 500 parking spaces. The cost of that parking facility was enormously expensive. And it took up four, it took up park space underground on this one-acre lot.

[00:24:46] And it took up four stories above the ground floor. So you couldn't get to an apartment until you got all the way up to the fifth, sixth story. And that was a huge lesson, not only in the cost of parking, but on the cost to the city in terms of the views, in terms of the infrastructure, and the backwards idea that we need parking across the train station. Yeah, that's a really good example. There's a couple other things I just want to point out there.

[00:25:15] Let's say that parking structure was $8 million to $10 million, which is probably pretty close. That does get passed back on. It might even have been more, right? And also, you know, kind of the new thing is, you know, retail, right? It eliminates the retail piece because parking has to be on the first few levels. So there's all these things that come into play, right? So do you want to see an apartment building with parking garage? Or would you rather see a Starbucks on the corner with, you know, with residential above it?

[00:25:45] So there's a lot more to this. And if you can reduce that parking requirement, then the developer would have maybe built 500 units on there. And so all of a sudden, the more options a renter has, the better it's going to be for the consumer, right? Like, it's just the market will drive rents up and down based on the amount and the supply and demand of the people.

[00:26:12] And so these little nuances are actually quite significant. But they're kind of invisible. And I don't think a lot of people really see them. But they really, really drive density, the amount of units you can put on there. And, of course, it affects the availability and affordability of the, you know, either the resident, in my case, the tenants, or even the home buyer, the homeowner, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you say lots of people don't know about it.

[00:26:41] That's one of the reasons why I wrote Key to the City. And it's one of the reasons why I have a team of 25 full-time people building the National Zoning Atlas. And just if any of your readers or listeners want to visit that site, it's at zoningatlas.org. And we've published zoning conditions for 6,700 jurisdictions. That's about 20% of the country. If you're up there, you can zoom into your site.

[00:27:07] We do have the full state of Arizona up on the map, by the way, Ken. And I think you'll be interested to see how the state zones for housing. I'll actually be in Tucson, by the way, in August for the housing forum. I'll be speaking at that. So maybe we'll meet in person. We don't have Idaho up on the map. So I'm trying to talk with folks up there. Idaho is super interesting from a zoning standpoint as I think 244 jurisdictions, every single one of them has to have zoning by state law.

[00:27:37] And it is the fastest growing state. So you do have some significant constraints on the housing market that are enacted through zoning. And I'm interested to see if we ever build off the Idaho portion of the National Zoning Atlas, what it reveals. Well, we need it. So can we dig into the National Zoning Atlas, how you founded it, why you founded it? I know it's quite a movement you've got going.

[00:28:03] Yeah, I mean, so we started in Connecticut where I lived and volunteered as the Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission chair. And we really built it to help people understand how the state of Connecticut zones. And what we did was we read 32,000 pages of zoning codes across 187 different zoning jurisdictions. Wow.

[00:28:31] And we extracted information from all of these zoning districts and put it up on this map where people could look, zoom into their towns, zoom out to their region, see the state as a whole. And collectively, the only way to get this statistic was to do exactly what we did, read the codes and digitize and map it. But we found that 91% of land in Connecticut allows single family housing and 2% of land allows multifamily housing as of right.

[00:29:00] So and a whole bunch of other stuff. 50% of land has a two acre minimum requirement for lot sizes, 50% of residential land. So two acre minimum for a single family house. That's more than a football field for a single family house. So, I mean, I could throw a thousand statistics at you, but the basic thing is that people didn't know what their zoning code said. They had no idea. And we built the Zoning Atlas in Connecticut to bring that to life. We expanded to other states.

[00:29:29] We finished 10 states. We're in addition to Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, D.C. And a couple others that I'm, Nevada that I'm forgetting. We are finishing California, Virginia and North Carolina, hopefully sometime this year. And we're going to hope to complete the rest of the country because people deserve to know what their zoning codes say.

[00:29:59] They deserve to be able to look just with one click. Where can I build single family? Where can I build multifamily? Where are their parking mandates? We have a whole filter just for that. So, again, I encourage your listeners and watchers to play around with that. It's free. And you can spit out snapshots of your jurisdiction to hand to those elected officials to convince them. Well, congrats on putting that together. That's a heck of a project. And it's really, really needed.

[00:30:27] I did want to also ask you about the opportunity zones. Have you gotten into that at all? Because I know a lot of times people are trying to, you know, minimize their capital gains. And they're going into these redevelopment areas. And I know we don't know exactly whether they're going to be extended or not. But at the time, we saw a lot of capital driving into that. Does that play into, you know, some of this? Yeah.

[00:30:54] I mean, I don't – we haven't mapped opportunity zones on the zoning, Alice. It isn't zone, I guess. But it's not sort of the same as land use regulation. It creates incentives, though. It identifies places where you can use incentives to build certain things. It would be interesting.

[00:31:12] We should probably think about how we might layer that on top and see whether the areas that policymakers have designated as opportunity zones actually have good zoning that can support the goals that they've set out in those zones. Yeah, because I'll just give you a couple examples. You know, we found that we're actually going to build into an opportunity zone because we're exiting some stuff and we're rolling the money into, you know, to the zone.

[00:31:41] Very, very typically, a lot of times those opportunity zones need to be rezoned, right? There has to be – and you go through the same process for development, whatever it is. So there might be, let's say, you know, some kind of zoning on there, industrial, commercial, residential, or whatever it is, low-density residential. And so it would be nice. It looks to me like the opportunity zone will be extended with this new administration. But, you know, who knows?

[00:32:10] We will see there. But it would be a great resource to be able to use your national zoning atlas to, you know, to kind of tie in with the opportunity zone. Because my guess is it's going to be a heck of a run here in the next four or five years if that's extended. Yeah. I mean, anything that helps to identify areas where priority development can happen needs to have the regulatory environment to actually make these projects a reality.

[00:32:40] So definitely we do see the zoning atlas as a tool that can inform whether government investments, whether government priority areas through opportunity zones or otherwise, might actually see the type of investment that's anticipated. I do think the same is true with transit. We spend a lot of money on transit stations.

[00:33:03] And zoning does not always ensure that we've capitalized on the public investments of the transit stations. There's a lot of zoning. We see it in Connecticut, in New York State, where we've looked at MTA lines outside of New York City. A lot of those areas are zoned for single-family housing. It is not recouping or promoting the state's investment. It's not smart zoning around those places. There's a lot of data there to dig in. That's a really, really good point.

[00:33:32] Maybe we can touch on that just a little bit. Do you find that some of the old zoning laws are restricting just transportation in general? Yeah. I have a chapter in Key to the City about that topic, about how our land use patterns and our zoning rules are not necessarily compatible with creating for ourselves. Transportation alternatives to the car.

[00:34:01] And it's not just, you know, I mentioned young people. But there's a lot of people that can't drive for a number of reasons. They might have a physical impairment. They might be older. They want other ways to get around other than a car. But we force them to drive or be driven because we've created these environments through zoning that are sprawled, that sort of sprawled out.

[00:34:25] So I think land use has a huge role to play in whether we're providing alternatives to the car. And, again, this is not necessarily just a, oh, I'm a biking advocate or, you know, whatever. This is just like for people of all walks of life who want alternatives for a variety of reasons.

[00:34:47] And we need to think about land use policy as very much related to transportation and how we get around and move in the world. So I think the title of that chapter is a bigger menu for movement. So anybody interested in that, check that out. How can the state level government work with the local level government? Because I know in Arizona, our governor passed an ADU law that, you know, anybody can do an ADU.

[00:35:14] But now the cities are just not approving or like disapproving the plans. They're just letting them sit on the desk. So that's kind of an example of the state trying to implement some laws that the local officials aren't allowing. So how is a better way versus from the top down for them to work together on this kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, there's different approaches that states have taken. So I mentioned a couple at the at the beginning of the conversation, more like mandates.

[00:35:44] The state of Utah has given local governments a menu. So legislators have said, here's I think it's maybe 15 things that you can do if you pick three of them and do them. I think you're pointing out a very unfortunate situation that we're seeing in Colorado. And maybe it sounds like in Arizona, too, where some communities are saying, I don't care what the state says. I'm not doing it. We're not changing our zoning codes.

[00:36:13] It's setting up this really interesting debate between. So if they don't comply with the Zoning Enabling Act with state law, who is suing? How do you get them to do that? Who's suing? Who is it? The attorney general suing the local government to enforce the zoning laws? That's where the rubber hits the road.

[00:36:34] If the state is serious about these reforms, it's the attorney general or maybe some other mechanism that's laid out of state law that they have to go out and go to court, go to the mat and enforce it. And that is, I think, setting up, again, a series of legal challenges and battles between state and local governments that may not be resolvable other than through the courts. I mean, so there's other ways. I mean, cooperation is general other than laws.

[00:37:02] I mean, there's general cooperation of guidance, incentives. But you can pay a city to hire a consultant to change the zoning code, but that doesn't change the way that the city treats applicants. They change the zoning code all day and the applicants can still be run through the rainer. It's a total mindset shift that needs to happen, but across the board.

[00:37:31] But then you sprinkle in the HOA in there and then you have a whole another issue. A hundred percent. Yeah. Well, this has been fantastic. So, Sarah, key to the city, the National Zoning Atlas, what are some ways that people can reach you, grab the book, and how do they use those two credible resources to make better decisions at the state and local level? Well, I would say that the book has stories.

[00:38:00] So, if you're new to zoning, then I hope that the book is accessible. It starts in Hartford. It talks about Houston, which is where I grew up, which has no zoning. It talks about examples from all over the country. And it's really trying to show – it weaves in a lot of the technical terms, but it does it through sort of examples from around the country and places that hopefully people can relate to. So, if you are new to zoning, I hope that's a good resource for you.

[00:38:30] Check it out from the library or find it at your local independent bookstore. The zoning atlas is for people who know what zoning is, maybe, and want to see how their town compares to others if it's up on the map. Or to get screenshots, to get advocacy materials, to understand really down in the details. Is there a height cap? Are there parking mandates? Is there a limitation on the number of units?

[00:38:57] What are the owner occupancy requirements for accessory dwellings and so on? So, that's a really good resource for people who have a little bit more background in zoning and really want to get down into the details, the data itself. So, I invite folks to engage with both of them. My mission in life may be to illuminate this very wonky, nerdy area to the public. And so, I hope people out there do end up using these resources.

[00:39:25] I think it's a massive, massive need to help us all figure out how to make housing more affordable for people. So, I appreciate all the work you've done kind of behind the scenes. I don't think it's nerdy at all. I think it's at the forefront now. I think we're just cracking this for the first time. Again, it's very niche. But you guys are in this niche. And so, I appreciate your inviting me on today. I very much appreciate you being on. And good luck to you.

[00:39:54] I'd love to weigh in later and see where this heads. And obviously, support you however we can. I appreciate it, Sarah. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Bye.