Latest news with #SaraBronin
CBS News
4 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
Dallas begins first major zoning overhaul in decades to tackle housing affordability and reshape city growth
Across Dallas, housing affordability continues to be a real challenge. The city is now embarking on its first zoning reform in decades. City leaders aim to boost housing supply, support sustainable growth, and make the development process more transparent. They are currently reviewing what's working, what needs to change, and gathering public input. As part of her "Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World" book tour, author and zoning expert Sara Bronin is partnering with the Dallas Housing Coalition to share her thoughts. She points out that single-family zoning is currently the dominant land-use type in Dallas. "Zoning dictates what can be built where, so it will say, for example, that you can only build a single-family home in this neighborhood or that you can only build a factory in that neighborhood," she said. "My thought about zoning is that we should try and make it more flexible and more open." Bronin said if more single-family residential areas were zoned for multi-family housing, such as duplexes and townhomes, it would open up more options for families. "It does seem like the planners in the city and many people around them are united in recognizing that zoning is not doing enough for Dallas and helping Dallas plan for its future," she said. Andrew Warren attended the event, interested in how Dallas' zoning reform effort could expand housing options. "I got married four years ago and my wife and I moved into an apartment, and after we lived there about two years, our rent went up by $600 a month," he said. Like many Dallas renters, Warren and his wife want to put that money toward a mortgage, so they've been exploring their options. "You know the homes are so expensive right now that we've had to save for a while to have enough for a down payment, plus once we have enough for that, we don't want to move somewhere and pay twice as much," he said. "I know some of these zoning changes will probably take a while to start to see the impacts of those, but it is something that we need to do." Warren said he's hopeful future changes will one day benefit his family. Dallas residents can learn more and share their feedback online at
Boston Globe
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
96 percent of Massachusetts is off-limits to most apartment buildings. Some hope a new map will change that.
'We have a huge housing problem in this country, and all of this discourse about how to fix it, and yet we still have yet to address the fact that it is simply illegal to build housing in most places,' said Sara Bronin, founder of the National Zoning Atlas. 'If you want to understand the housing crisis, that's a pretty good place to start.' Advertisement The Massachusetts Zoning Atlas is part of a broader effort to document the zoning of every state in the US. The aim, said Bronin, is to make clear to policymakers Advertisement In Massachusetts, the process of creating the atlas started a few years ago with Suffolk University law professor John Infranca, who enlisted his students to pore over each of the state's 352 municipal zoning codes. Related : The process was monotonous. Many of the local codes are hundreds of pages long, some with dozens of overlay districts, rules that contradict each other, and outdated maps. Some are so complex, the researchers had to contact town officials to understand exactly what their zoning permitted in certain areas. Eventually, researchers with the national project took over, confirming Infranca's work and programming it into a map that documents the zoning. That the process was so grueling highlights the point of the project, said Infranca. If it takes a team of researchers several years to interpret and document local zoning codes, that should be an indication that those codes are too complicated. A street of single-family homes in Milton. Lane Turner/Globe Staff 'If it takes us years to understand what exactly all of this zoning means, how can we expect builders to navigate that system and create the housing we need?' he said. The end product is perhaps the most comprehensive look at the land-use policies of all 351 Massachusetts municipalities. Indeed, apartment buildings — a project with four or more units, as the atlas defines them — can only be built by-right on 4 percent of the state's 7,800 square miles of land. A view of the Massachusetts Zoning Atlas, a project that maps all of the zoning codes in the state. Purple areas are zoning districts that allow apartment buildings of four units or more. National Zoning Atlas Three-family buildings are only allowed on 7 percent of Massachusetts land, and two-families on 38 percent of land. Single-family homes, meanwhile, can be built on 96 percent of the land in this state. And that's after many municipalities have passed new zoning districts allowing multifamily housing under the MBTA Communities law. Advertisement Decades ago, zoning in Massachusetts used to be much simpler, one reason the state built apartments at more than double the pace it does today. Much of the older multifamily housing that exists in suburban Boston today was built by-right, meaning without special municipal approval, when that sort of housing was broadly allowed. But starting in the 1960s, that began to change, 'We know how these zoning rules have shaped the racial and economic makeup of communities across the state,' said Kanson-Benanav. 'The only way we can build more reasonably sized and reasonably affordable housing and make a dent in our massive shortage of homes is to allow more housing to be built.' The result is that the zoning atlas's map feature shows only small chunks of land where multifamily housing can be built, like 2 percent of Milton (while neighboring Quincy allows apartments on 32 percent of its land), and 1 percent of the total land area of Plymouth. An apartment building under construction in Revere. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff The aim of the project, ultimately, is to spur reform to state land-use rules. As Massachusetts struggles with sky-high housing prices and a growing shortage of homes, it makes sense to start with allowing more apartments to be built, researchers said. Advertisement And they have already successfully made that case in other states. In Montana, for example, lawmakers cited the atlas as a main motivator behind what some housing advocates have called ' 'We are hoping that legislators who acknowledge that we need more housing in this state will look at our map and see that you can't build it much of anywhere,' said Infranca. 'That, we think, is an effective argument for change.' Andrew Brinker can be reached at
