Good morning, friends. Here is your daily reading on the benefits of elimination single-family only (R1) zoning. This time it's from @TheAtlantic. Please educate yourself find out what you can't or can't tolerate. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
I can't stress enough how important it is for you to interrogate motives--yours, mine, and everyone's--in this debate. Many Council members (Black and white) live in "beautiful" R1 zoned neighborhoods they want to protect. Pay attention the the Myers Park and Eastover HOAs.
Just as in the debate about prematurely swinging open the doors of schools, folx will couch their objection to elimination R1 zoning to something more popular than NIMBYism, but when it's all stripped away, I think this is an argument that remains.
"R1 not only segregates people by race and class, but artificially increases prices and hurts the environment. By outlawing the construction of duplexes, triplexes, and other multifamily units, R1 zoning artificially constrains the housing supply, driving prices by gov. fiat."
Sound familiar? "Predictably, the proposal to end [R1] zoning and adopt other reforms triggered a major backlash from wealthy white homeowners. Critics called the elimination of [R1] zoning a gift to developers, who would change the “character” of neighborhoods by overbuilding."
"Electing a mayor and city-council president [...] in their 30s meant leadership understood that [R1] made housing unaffordable [...], that a policy with racist origins was unacceptable, and that the practice’s promotion of urban sprawl and climate change was intolerable."
Pay attention, friends. The same forces that worked so hard to defeat Minneapolis' plan will work to defeat ours, too. And it will, as we've already seen, create some strange bedfellows. There are folks who are working to divide us up so that we are less effective. Don't buy it.
CORRECTION: R3, not R1, is the least dense current district in CLT and not R1 (one lot per acre); thanks for the correction by my (actual) good friend, @Larken.
My framing here leaves much to desire. This shouldn't be couched in "eliminating" terms but rather no longer having exclusive zones for only one type of residential--basically allowing more density and choice for property owners, too.
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