Charlottesville is on the verge of making a disastrous decision.
At least that’s the prognosis of some local homeowners convinced that a divisive zoning proposal will irreparably harm the city they love.
“What we’re going to get is increased density, increased traffic, increased infrastructure problems, increased taxes, increased gentrification,” Philip Harway told The Daily Progress, predicting the city’s future. “Charlottesville will lose a lot of its charm.”
What’s more, people like Harway believe the public is being duped.
“When this whole thing started, this was sold to everybody as an affordable housing issue,” Harway said. “This isn’t going to create a lot of affordable housing.”
For several months now, a vocal group has been asking city leadership to reconsider the zoning proposal, arguing that it would produce deleterious effects without doing much to alleviate the city’s housing crisis.
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Academics, however, argue that zoning plans such as Charlottesville’s can be a meaningful step toward making housing more affordable.
Yet opponents have remained steadfast, tagged with unflattering labels such as NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”), old, privileged and racist.
Three of those opponents recently met with The Daily Progress, each armed with folders containing a trove of documents about the proposal’s perceived flaws, to clarify their stance.
“There should be no reason that there’s anybody in the city who’s unhoused or unable to afford housing,” Mary Summers Whittle said. “That’s not going to be solved by building more condominiums or inflating the price of property within the city.”
They’re not against affordable housing, Mark Kavit said at the start of the meeting.
“What we want to see is appropriate development,” Kavit said.
An anti-rezoning sign sits on Rugby Avenue in Charlottesville on Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023.
Upzoning comes to Charlottesville
A city’s zoning code helps determine what can be developed where. For decades in Charlottesville, as in so many other parts of the country, zoning has favored single-family residences, which tend to be more expensive than multifamily ones.
“This limits opportunities for households and renters with lower incomes, many of whom are people of color,” reads a 2023 report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
As much of the U.S. faces a housing affordability crisis, some jurisdictions have started easing zoning laws to allow more multifamily properties and grow density.
Charlottesville is on track to do the same.
The increasingly popular practice is known as upzoning, and at the heart of it is a simple theory: Adding to the housing supply will reduce housing costs.
Charlottesville’s rezoning opponents don’t buy it.
“People are taking an overly simplistic view and just saying, ‘If you build more, prices go down,’” Summers Whittle said.
“This neighborhood, I give it a couple years,” she continued, pointing to nearby 10th & Page. “This kind of affordable housing and historically African American neighborhoods will be the first to go. They’re on the chopping block.”
Their position defies many local organizations committed to housing affordability. The Haven day shelter, Charlottesville Low-Income Housing Coalition, Piedmont Housing Alliance and the Legal Aid Justice Center are just some of the groups in support of the rezoning.
Yet opponents remain defiant. They say upzoning won’t work. They are certain of it.
The academic literature is not.
The Charlottesville Planning Commission holds a zoning update meeting at CitySpace on the Downtown Mall on Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023.
Upzoning across America and beyond
Research on upzoning is nuanced, but evidence indicates that more housing does in fact lead to lower house prices.
One recent study published last year examined what happens when new apartment buildings are built in low-income neighborhoods. Across 11 different cities, it found that the addition of new buildings lowered rents in nearby units by about 6%.
“Our findings would suggest that it certainly won’t increase rent,” the study’s co-author Brian Asquith, an applied microeconomist with the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, told The Daily Progress.
Another study made a similar finding in New York City. New high-rise apartment buildings caused nearby rents and condominium sales prices to decrease because they “alleviated demand pressure.”
“Opposing such development may exacerbate the housing affordability crisis and increase housing cost burdens for local renters,” the 2019 New York University study concludes.
And earlier this year, Pew Trust looked at four different jurisdictions across the U.S. that have recently relaxed their zoning regulations. It found that more flexible zoning helped those areas build housing faster, keeping up with their rising populations and thus slowing rent growth.
“Although rents remain fairly high in the four places examined, they are certainly lower than they would be if the cities had not allowed more housing,” reads the report.
Researchers say that to reduce housing costs, more houses need to be built. And upzoning can lead to more construction.
“I live in a currently single-family neighborhood and suddenly someone could buy a lot and build three townhouses on it,” Betsy Roettger of the University of Virginia School of Architecture told The Daily Progress. “That’s naturally going to be more affordable because you can build more units.”
While evidence indicates that upzoning can increase land values in the short term, the price per unit should decrease.
“The land becomes more expensive because it increases a developer’s option value,” Jenna Davis, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, told The Daily Progress. “But because you can build more units on that specific parcel of land, theoretically the per-unit housing cost should be lower.”
Davis’ use of “theoretical” may bring little comfort to upzoning opponents, whose skepticism is not baseless.
An oft-cited paper found evidence for “higher housing prices in the short term” after upzoning policies were implemented in Chicago.
But the paper’s author, Yonah Freemark, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, said his study was strictly focused on mixed-use business corridors — not residential neighborhoods.
“A lot of folks like to use my Chicago paper, I’m well aware, in contexts that are not relevant to it,” Freemark told The Daily Progress. “My paper is really about a specific zoning reform that’s different than what places like Charlottesville are pursuing.”
Upzoning in the U.S. and the research on it is very much in its infancy.
Minneapolis made headlines when it announced its upzoning plans in 2018, yet the reform did not go into effect until 2020. And while housing and rental prices have declined since, they were already declining prior to upzoning.
“Obviously, it’s going to take a number of years for it to have some kind of impact,” Edward Goetz, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Minnesota, told The Daily Progress. “[Upzoning] is a more complicated picture than most people are trying to paint.”
To find the long-term effects of the policy, Americans must look beyond their borders, academics say.
“Canada and Australia have been doing this for 50 years,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Andrew Whittemore told The Daily Progress. “It’s diversified housing a lot, it’s contributed a lot to supply, you’ve had price ranges increase in formerly more exclusive areas.”
But he cautions that Vancouver and Sydney are still “infamously unaffordable.”
“Presumably if they hadn’t upzoned, the situation would be even worse. But they haven’t solved their housing crisis,” he said.
From left to right, Charlottesville city council members Brian Pinkston and Michael Payne sit in CitySpace on the Downtown Mall during a planning commission meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023.
A step toward affordability
So how much will upzoning help Charlottesville’s housing crisis?
“We don’t know. We know it will help some just by allowing more of the land to have more housing on it,” Roettger said. “It’s not ensuring it, but it is a step to allow more affordable housing.”
On this, there appears to be consensus. With the U.S. facing a housing shortage, in part due to local restrictive zoning policies, many academics agree that loosening those restrictions can help increase housing stock.
“Although these reforms do not guarantee increased construction, they remove substantial barriers to developing more housing types that may also be more affordable to produce,” reads the Harvard report.
Davis reached a similar conclusion in a piece she wrote for the Brookings Institution.
“Zoning regulations that allow for added residential density hold substantial promise to increase the much-need housing supply and push back on the racist legacy of low-density exclusionary zoning,” she wrote.
“It’s just dismal out there,” Whittemore said of the current housing market. “And the biggest part of that is we haven’t been building supply.”
“In the short term, new building or upzoning may not reduce housing prices and in fact may actually increase them,” Goetz said. “But in the long run, we of course need more housing.”
To be sure, upzoning critics are not solely concerned about affordable housing. They say the Charlottesville rezoning plan will have myriad ill effects across the city: higher property taxes, overcrowding, the loss of tree canopy, rampant speculation and an overwhelmed infrastructure system.
“No infrastructure and no traffic planning. None,” Summers Whittle said of the city’s work. “So if they achieve their density, whether it creates affordability or not, it’s going to be a nightmare.”
In a July memo, the city concluded that its infrastructure systems “have sufficient existing capacity to handle the likely development that could occur under the new zoning ordinance.”
As for speculation, land values will almost certainly increase when the upzoning policy is implemented. That could entice developers to buy up land across the city, tear down homes and build multifamily units for a profit. That would mean more housing, but it could also mean developers would take over historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
A previous version of the zoning proposal would have combated that possibility with a “sensitive communities overlay,” which would have required that developers include affordable housing units in certain neighborhoods. Affordability advocates and Council Member Michael Payne would like to see that overlay restored to protect certain communities, but Payne also said the current draft should be compared with the status quo.
“There is already a huge economic incentive for developers to purchase older homes, tear them down and convert them into large, new single-family homes, which is already rampant and targeted disproportionately at neighborhoods like 10th & Page near UVa,” Payne told The Daily Progress.
With so many worries about possible consequences, opponents would like to see upzoning occur in certain neighborhoods instead of across the whole city. Try it out and see what happens, they say.
But a research paper out of the University of California, Los Angeles, advises that if a city wants to upzone, it should upzone the entire city. Otherwise, there will be bidding wars over land in the few neighborhoods that are upzoned, driving up prices.
“Broad upzoning favors small-scale developers — the builders of ‘missing middle housing’ who are more popular with the public than their larger, wealthier, more politically connected peers,” the study reads.
“There has been the argument that if upzoning is applied broadly across the city, you’re not going to have that dynamic where developers are swooping in and buying up single-family homes and converting them if they have the option to do that anywhere,” Davis said.
An opponent of Charlottesville’s rezoning proposal holds a sign expressing his displeasure at a meeting on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023.
‘I don’t want to be right’
With all that said, upzoning is not going to automatically fix Charlottesville’s housing crisis. Experts say it is one step of many that a city must take to make housing more affordable.
“I think we should be clear and honest: Upzoning is not a miracle solution. It cannot solve all problems,” Freemark said. “Whether it comes to housing construction or housing affordability, upzoning is just one among many policy actions that need to be taken.”
As for fears that upzoning may forever damage the city’s neighborhoods?
“That’s ridiculous. There’s no evidence that allowing apartments into a single-family neighborhood is going to destroy that community or that it will no longer be a good place to live,” Freemark said.
Goetz added that when someone buys a house or property, they are not given a guarantee that future policies won’t affect their purchase’s value one way or another.
“City governments have to pursue policies that they identify as being in the best interests of the growth of the city and the use of land and resources,” Goetz said. “Property owners are exposed to those risks whether that’s going to be beneficial to them or not. There’s just no way around that.”
Charlottesville’s different factions will continue debating the proposed zoning changes up until City Council takes its final vote, which may occur as soon as December. The debate may last well beyond the implementation of the new zoning, as concerned citizens argue over what the city will look like in 20 years and beyond.
“Somebody will be more right than the other person,” Harway said of predictions of an upzoned Charlottesville. “And I don’t want to be right. I would love to come back and say, ‘Gee, that was really dumb of us to object to that. Look at everything it’s accomplished.’”