Michael Long: Housing for people, not profit

This commentary is by Michael Long, of Burlington, a former member of the city’s Zoning Board of Adjustment and its Development Review Board. He is a retired English teacher with a master’s in natural resource planning from the University of Vermont.

The Burlington City Council is under pressure to fast-track a zoning amendment called “Neighborhood Code” before Miro Weinberger leaves the mayor’s office. He considers this rezoning “the most significant action” in his administration “to do something meaningful about the housing crisis.” But now that a new mayor and a substantially different council will be sworn in April 1, it’s especially obvious how wrong it would be to pass a deeply flawed but enormously significant zoning rewrite into law at the March 25 lame-duck Council meeting. Neighborhood Code is not a “meaningful” response to the housing crisis; it’s yet another developer’s boondoggle by an administration that’s limping out the door.

The public knows almost nothing about the extremity of Neighborhood Code and the so-called public outreach kept its extreme measures under wraps.

These measures were:

• allowing eight or ten units on almost any lot, however small;
• increasing lot coverage and unmanaged stormwater runoff by 30-70%; and
• radically deregulating development with no requirement or expectation that any of the housing built will be affordable.

Additionally, despite celebrating density, Neighborhood Code keeps the wealthiest, most spacious neighborhoods in low-density zones. And despite championing the “missing middle,” it threatens to bury diverse “missing middle” neighborhoods in density run amok.

Neighborhood Code is part of a movement associated with “density,” “infill” and “the missing middle” whose intentions are worthy: making quality housing more available for everyone. Neighborhood Code is also widely referred to as “upzoning,” a term associated with more permissive zoning that pleases developers. This is the rub in Burlington: These are competing but related interests, and profitable upzoning is taking precedence over the affordable housing people want and need.

Portland, Oregon modified its zoning in 2020 to address a housing crisis. This was heralded then as the best low-density zoning reform in U.S. history. It permitted four units on almost any lot, a major density increase. This change has led in many Portland neighborhoods to two or three taller narrow units on lots where one single family house was sited before — but substantial green space remains — despite the additional units.

Burlington’s Neighborhood Code recklessly supersizes what Portland has done by allowing eight or ten units on almost any lot. It makes no provisions for managing the additional stormwater or parking demand; it sacrifices green space to density; and it leaves affordability to market forces. This is how “upzoning” can become a neighborhood disaster, instead of a housing crisis panacea. Density can and must be done well.

Green-lighting eight or ten units — even on small single-family lots — is green-lighting a development fiasco. Making no provisions for stormwater or parking is not responsible planning. Requiring no affordable units betrays the fundamental justification for a major zoning change: addressing the housing crisis.

The hurry to enact this zoning amendment is reminiscent of the push to change the zoning rules in 2016 so that 14-story towers could rise high above a one-story mall. That did not work out well and Burlington suffered for years after through what came to be known as the Pit. Now an appropriately downsized project is proceeding at last, and this project will provide affordable units as required by the city’s inclusionary affordable housing provision.

Portland’s zoning change allowed up to six units but only if half were “affordable.” This provision promised to intersperse below-market housing throughout the city rather than segregate it. In Burlington we have long had an inclusionary zoning provision, but it pays only lip service to interspersing below-market housing with the rest. Neighborhood Code goes beyond loopholes to an outright affordable housing dodge: Affordable units are only required with the development of “five or more residential units in a single structure ,” and Neighborhood Code prioritizes fourplexes.

Developers currently can meet their inclusionary responsibilities for projects with five or more units by building affordable units elsewhere or making modest cash payments to a housing fund. But they have been known to talk their way out of doing what they promised to do. This happened in 2008 when the developer of Westlake reneged on fulfilling the project’s inclusionary responsibility, citing “footings” that rendered the cost of construction prohibitive. I was on the Development Review Board at the time and the Board was skeptical but approved a settlement anyway.

Neighborhood Code doesn’t even have an affordable housing component that a developer might manage to dodge. A former city councilor has called it a “developer’s dream.” It would allow previously impermissible new units to be marketed at whatever the market would bear. Given Burlington’s low vacancy rate and the competition for housing intensified by thousands of UVM juniors, seniors, and graduate students, these would not be affordable units.

Under the banner of addressing the housing crisis with laissez-faire density, Neighborhood Code would legalize the development of housing for profit not people — and without regard for the grass, the garden, the lake, or the Earth.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Michael Long: Housing for people, not profit .