Small Town Zoning Fixes

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Many small towns across the U.S. are facing an ever-increasing housing deficit. Residents say that housing is scarce and expensive, which is completely true. What housing exists is often a poor match for the (aging) demographics of the community. While many residents acknowledge that there are housing supply, attainability, and choice issues, they are concerned that any zoning changes to allow more and different kinds of housing will irrevocably alter the place they love.

It is understandable that residents are leery about allowing change: developers have built some very unfortunate things in the past 50 years. In addition to fear of change and the belief that nothing new-built can be appropriate, the way that zoning changes get enacted in many small towns and rural areas contributes to the difficulties with making changes to the zoning code. For example, in many parts of New England, the entire town has to vote on a zoning code change at an annual town meeting, making it difficult to propose sweeping updates. But this situation is certainly not hopeless.

This issue of Zoning Practice explores six incremental zoning reforms that small towns and rural communities can implement to widen the path to greater housing production and choice, while at the same time improving the jurisdiction's fiscal health. These are all code patches: they do not require a complete zoning code rewrite, something that most small towns have neither the political will, professional capacity, nor financial wherewithal to undertake.

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