Some years ago, I was looking at building a four-plex in Portland, Oregon. At the time the local impact fees were calculated at $20,000 per Dwelling Unit. That was the fee for one of the 4,000 SF single unit houses that were replacing little 800 SF workers cottages as One-forOne Tear-downs, and it was the fee for one of the 500 SF one bedroom four-plex units I wanted to build in a diverse walkable SE Portland neighborhood.

$20,000 per Dwelling Unit translated to $5 per SF for the big house in the one-for-one Tear-down scenario. $20,000 per Dwelling Unit is $40 per SF for a 500 SF one bedroom apartment. My tenants would be paying $200 a month in rent to amortize a fee that does not actually purchase land or building materials.

I had a hard time finding sites where I would be allowed to build four units on a 50 x 100 lot. There are 8.7 5,000 SF lots in a net acre and four dwelling units on a 5,000 SF lot is 35 Dwelling Units per acre. —Never mind that there were lots of 4 and 12 unit buildings on 50 x 100 lots up and down the street where I found a vacant lot, the zoning code would only allow single family residential buildings to be built.

This experience showed me how inequitable and unreasonable the definition of “Dwelling "Unit” can be when it is used to assess fees and calculate allowed density. Portland’s Comprehensive Plan contained all kinds of well-intentioned policy language about increasing housing affordability and housing choice, but those policies could not be implemented because the local zoning code made such things illegal. One more frustrating example of why we cannot have nice things, (even though we have adopted an elaborate policy document that says we want to…) NOTE: Recent statewide legislation has changed what you can build in Oregon cities with more than 10,000 people.

The Proposed Text Amendment above is a patch which can fix this problem in your local zoning code.

I have been at this Placemaking for a while. I have met so many sincere and dedicated people who want to make their town or neighborhood better. I have been in the room when they confront the reason their town’s planning process has failed. It is never pretty.

Most states mandate municipalities to adopt a Comprehensive Plan and keep it updated regularly. The shorthand is Comp Plan. The intended purpose is for local elected officials, senior staff, and local residents to create a policy framework for the manner in which their town with build/rebuild. Producing these documents can be pretty expensive. Most places make a real effort to engage their residents and community leaders to help write the Comp Plan and to get the work out so that folks can pay attention while it is still in draft form. Eventually the Comp Plan is presented to the city council accompanied by a lengthy staff report recommending approval. The council votes to adopt the Comp Plan as a key policy document they expect will guide the current and future elected officials and senior staff in conducting the town’s business.

In the Implementation or Work Plan sections of the Comp Plan, there is typically a paragraph describing the need to revise the local zoning code and development ordinances to make sure the policies in the Comp Plan are going to get turned into reality.

A couple years go by and there are no changes or revisions to the local zoning. And that’s the problem. The Comp Plan is a policy document. The zoning code is a law. The law is written with greater precision and if the law contradicts the policy, the law is what folks need to follow until the city council changes the law…

I have seen good developers propose excellent projects which totally deliver the stated intent of the policy guidance in the Comp Plan get shot down based upon the leftover zoning code from 20 years ago. When this plays out there is often an earnest young planning staffer in the mix who is shocked and heartbroken to see this happen. There are frequently folks sitting on the city council who do not understand that leftover zoning code actually prevents the diligent realization of the policies of the Comp Plan.

I used to think this was an unfortunate and isolated occurrence. With time I found that is is common enough that people tend to just accept the contradiction that crushes the hopes and dreams of local residents.

Read your Comp Plan and then read your zoning code. On the first pass it may seem like you probably aren’t fully understanding the two documents. The two documents seem to have been put together with serious intent and a lot of technical detail, so a casual reader might think it is them, they are not getting it.

The best Comp Plan can be crippled or canceled by a mediocre zoning code. It really does happen.

A cottage court by Jeremy Sommer of Sommer Design Studios

I continue to be amazed at how many well intentioned people want to talk about affordable housing without being willing to put any effort into learning the basic math required to build....well, anything.

Capital "A" Affordable Housing is a term of art, a subspecialty amount real estate development. Affordable Housing is crudely defined and over simplified. I blame Herbert Hoover. His metric of a maximum of 30% of a household’s gross income to be spent on housing metric was apparently set in stone in the 1930's before automobile ownership was common (or required). Federal housing policy still uses that bullshit metric.

As we can see Housing + Transportation Index , the percentage of income you need to spend on transportation has a lot to do with where you rent or buy your home. “Drive ‘til you qualify”.

If 30% of the household's gross income is the key metric that determines if a household is "rent burdened", what happens if the household needs to spend 40% of their gross income on transportation, keeping 2 semi-reliable vehicles on the road?

There are a lot of households that are both rent burdened and transportation burdened.

What happens if the cost to develop and build housing increases year over year and household gross income does not increase to keep up? What happens if wages are stagnant for, say the last 25 years?

If folks are not paid a decent wage, they cannot afford decent housing. Policy and design folks who have avoided basic development math for their entire career try to solve this problem by searching for ways to make housing less expensive somehow. The math is relentless. You can't beat that basic math with off-site fabrication, density bonuses, inclusionary zoning, and financial subsidies, yet we see lots of well-intentioned folks trying to do so over and over...

So here are the overlapping, compounding structural problems I see:

1. We have built in the wrong pattern to provide naturally occurring affordable housing.

2. We are not building enough housing or enough of the right kinds of housing, so the costs continue to outstrip what people can pay.

3. We have defined "Affordability" in epically stupid ways.

4. We have applied Exclusionary Zoning over 70% of most cities and towns and constrained where denser walkable places worth caring about can be built/rebuilt.

5. Typical conventional zoning prohibits proven market rate solutions which need no subsidy, like attached or detached ADU's, dividing a larger house in to two or more smaller dwelling units, SROs and boarding houses.

6. We have created a culture that believes a toxic myth, that people who signed 3/4 of an inch of mortgage paperwork without reading it are somehow morally superior to the unfortunate lower caste of "renters". This pernicious othering becomes the justification for actively excluding rental housing from their neighborhood.

7. We have removed shop classes from most public schools and implemented ridiculous immigration policies which greatly limit the number of people available who know how to build anything. The lack of skilled construction labor has killed our productivity when we do get around to building.

Large scale builders can only deliver affordable units as new construction or substantial renovation with subsidies and tax credits. The amount of subsidies and tax credits available will just not meet the crushing demand we have for housing. Throwing money at overlapping systemic problems which are so poorly defined will not solve them.

So, yes, affordable housing is very difficult to build under the current assumption that people need to buy a house or condo, or they need to rent a house or apartment. In order for large scale projects to provide affordable housing you have to solve or mitigate several of the systemic structural problems described above all at the same time. Large scale affordable housing operators are specialists and have to focus on threading a series of entitlement, design, and finance needles just to stay in business. Too often the results are big lumpy out of scale projects that deliver unfortunate commodity housing. Building the wrong stuff more efficiently is not a virtue, but it is rewarded by the current culture and systems.

Some small scale incremental options which still work. House Hacking -a shared house allows the person with a modest W2 job buying the house on a 0% Down VA or a 3.5% down FHA , Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac mortgage to live rent free by renting out a couple of rooms.

You can scale that approach up a bit and building/rebuild a duplex, triplex, or four-plex and living in one of the units. This allows the mortgage borrower to claim 75% of the gross rent for the other units toward their income to qualify for the VA, FHA, Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac mortgages or purchase rehab loan.

And yes, these methods require more pragmatic zoning codes than we see in most places where elected officials wring their hands about the housing crisis. It’s worth taking a little political risk and changing your Exclusionary Zoning. These methods can provide folks living in low status neighborhoods to avoid displacement and build generational wealth.

There are grass roots, bottom up ways to organize and deliver lowercase "a" affordable housing.

I encourage urbanists and neighborhood activists to pay attention to what can be done when you cultivate a local network of small scale developers and clear the administrative underbrush so they can build local solutions.