Is Upzoning the Next Political Battleground?

As rents rise amid an already scarce stock of affordable housing, some cities are turning to deregulating single-family lots in order to upzone some sections into multifamily housing. A new proposal in Virginia would allow builders to put duplexes into previously single-family zones. These extra units will help alleviate the housing shortage, but Virginia’s proposal and others like it have received criticism claiming that duplexes will congest suburbs and take away natural resources. Upzoning is becoming increasingly political, but the interesting facet of the debate is that its proponents do not fall on one side or the other of the political spectrum—rare in a time of extreme polarization. 

A proposed plan in Virginia to allow extra housing units on single-family lots has become the latest example of local zoning igniting partisan debate, underscoring how housing laws are becoming a bigger and bigger political issue in the midst of the nation’s affordable housing crisis.

Floated last week by Ibraheem Samirah, a member of the state’s new progressive Democratic majority, the proposal has already been attacked by Republicans, who say it will increase sprawl and traffic congestion, and conservative media.

The Virginia proposal would not, as critics claim, make single-family homes illegal or mandate any particular type of construction. It would deregulate housing rules and allow property owners to build duplexes in areas where they currently aren’t allowed, a move Samirah and his supporters believe will increase density in a state suffering from the nation’s affordable housing crisis. As CityLab writer Kriston Capps notes in a story about idea, “local governments may still set restrictive setbacks, height limits, and parking requirements for properties,” meaning they still maintain significant control over the size of the buildings that go up in these areas.

Does the reaction to the Virginia proposal suggest that upzoning and adding housing density to suburban neighborhoods may become a new front in the partisan political divide? It’s certainly an important one; the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives was a result of sweeping victories in 2018 in the kinds of upscale suburbs that would be the focus of these types of upzoning proposals.

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