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Three Ways Zoning Can Advance Housing and Climate Justice

Zoning reform is not sexy. It’s a complicated process deeply entangled in bureaucratic decisionmaking that often stifles public participation. But zoning profoundly shapes our communities: it is the local regulatory tool that helps dictate where housing, schools, and parks are located; who can access them; and how they’re built.

In the United States, zoning codes played a central role in producing the place-based inequality characteristic of many American cities. Racist and classist zoning decisions locked in patterns of segregation and neighborhood disinvestment that created inequitable access to economic opportunity and disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards for households with low incomes and households of color.

Today, zoning that restricts construction to single-family homes continues to reinforce these patterns, limiting upward mobility, driving up housing costs, and forcing the development of new affordable housing into areas farther from quality jobs and education. Because of the disparate effects of climate change, such housing is also increasingly vulnerable to firesfloods, and other climate-related hazards.

In California, restrictive zoning, which also drives up high construction costs, pushed much of the state’s housing development into wildland-urban interface where land is cheaper and easier to develop—but more vulnerable to wildfire. The confluence of development in fire-prone areas and the increasing intensity of California’s wildfires has resulted in five of the most damaging fire seasons in California history, setting new records in acres burned (PDF) and damages to residential property (PDF).

Read more from the Urban Institute here>>>