A long and wonky blog post on zoning and single family homes

This is a wonky blog post about zoning and what types of houses are permitted. For most folks this will be boring and you should skip it, but I hope for folks interested in the subject it might be informative. 

Back in March, Allison Garfield wrote a cover story for the Capital Times on "housing rules" - mostly about 'single family housing' and changes to zoning in Madison. Allison and I were going to talk for that story and so I jotted down some thoughts. After some phone tag we never did connect, but I figured I'd expand my notes into a post, so that's what you're reading. I held off on posting because this turned into more of a campaign issue in some contests and out of an abundance of caution I thought it better to wait until after the election.

Part 1: "Single Family Zoning"

To jump straight to the punchline, I'm going to say the same thing twice, though phrased differently each time, and then explain why this is both not a big change but also an important change.

Version number 1: In the near future, I predict there will be a modest change to the zoning code to allow for two-unit family homes anywhere you can currently build a single family home in Madison. Nothing drastic, but at least a change of "if it's a permitted use to build a ranch with a 2 car garage there, you can build a duplex there too." 

Version number 2: In the near future, I predict Madison will eliminate single-family zoning from its zoning code. 

Version number 2 is sometimes thought of as a scary change. Most people aren't that worried about version number 1 - after all, what's the difference between living on a block with 6 duplexes or 12 bungalows? The thing to know is that both version 1 and version 2 are saying the same thing. 

Let's do two quick important clarifications on some definitions: what do we mean by 'single family homes' and what does it mean to 'eliminate' single family zoning?

First, what is a single family home? A lot of the Madison zoning code is about the "form" of a building - that is, it literally says "here's the shape a building has to take." So, in the City zoning code on "building forms", the exact term we're talking about for single-family homes is "Single-Family Detached Building" and it's defined as "a single-family dwelling with yards on all sides, oriented to the street, with an attached or detached garage." - i.e. a classic standalone house. This is the City's diagram of one:

Here are three building forms that for this blog post we explicitly do not mean when say 'single family home':

1. "Two Unit Building". The zoning code defines these as "A building containing two dwelling units that are vertically stacked one above the other, with a separate entrance to each unit and with yards on all sides." For these, think about the houses on the downtown isthmus. Here's a diagram from the City

2. "Two-Family Building, Twin". The zoning code defines these as "A building containing two attached dwelling units that share a common side wall and that are usually on separate lots, with the common wall at the lot line...The dwellings can also be treated as condominiums, with a third ownership area consisting of the remainder of the lots." Most people would call these duplexes. Again, here's the City's diagram

3. "Single-Family Attached Building" - Here's the definition from the zoning code: "A dwelling unit within a linear group of horizontally attached dwellings, each having a private entrance and totally exposed front and rear walls to be used for access, light and ventilation." For these, think Townhouse or Rowhouse. Here's the City's diagrams:

When we talk about 'single family zoning', what we mean is that an area is zoned to only permit the 'Single Family Detached Dwelling' building form/type for housing. As it turns out, large sections of Madison permit only 'Single Family Detached Dwellings' - that is, do not permit the Two-unit buildings or Two-Family Twin units (e.g. no flats nor duplexes) and do not permit rowhouses or townhouses. 

If there's only one thing you remember from this blog post this is the line I want you to remember: "eliminating single family zoning" means allowing more than just 'Single-Family Detached Buildings' to be built in a zoning district. Super important: it does not mean that you cannot build single-family detached dwellings. Let me say that again: If single-family zoning is eliminated, single-family homes would still be permitted. Eliminating single-family zoning allows for more types of housing forms to be built, and doesn't eliminate anything. 

In every residential zoning district, building a single-family detached dwelling is permitted. In fact, basically everywhere the City permits some kind of residential use, you can build a "single-family detached dwelling." There are a handful of exceptions where only larger apartment/condo buildings are permitted - like, you can't build a single-family house on State St - but we can mostly ignore those areas for this blog post.

Since this is a wonky post and if you've read this far you probably want details, like how do you know what's permitted where? Look at the table in the 'Building Forms' sections of each subchapter of the zoning code - here the section for "Residential Districts" and for 'Mixed Use and Commercial Districts' and for 'Downtown Districts' and for 'Employment Districts'  

And then click on the image below to take a look at the City's zoning map to see what an area is zoned:

So finally, with this background, let me be very specific: my prediction is that at some point in the future, the Common Council will amend the zoning code  to say that in the "Suburban Residental" SR-C1 and SR-C2 and "Traditional Residential" TR-C1, TR-C2 and TR-C3 districts, 'Two Unit Buildings' and 'Two-Family Building, Twin' will become a 'Permitted Use'. This would build on one of the changes of the Transit-Oriented Development Overlay District (TOD) - for the parts of the overlay district that are zoned one of those 5 types, two-family dwelling units are permitted there, but for the rest of the City that is not in the overlay district, two-family dwelling units are not generally permitted in those five zoning districts. 

(There are lots of other changes in the TOD that are less likely to extend city-wide so I don't think there would be any interest in making TOD apply to the whole city, but I do think allowing duplexes and two-story flats city-wide would make sense) 

If that change was made, 'single-family zoning' would be eliminated in Madison, but I don't think most of Madison would notice.
 

Part II: What does eliminating Single Family Zoning change in Madison?

For most of Madison, it would not make a big change to what's on the ground now. Fifty years from now, the parts of Madison that are single family homes are still mostly going to be single family homes, especially the parts that are more than a mile or two away from the capitol or aren't close to a transit stop, and were built after 1945. We hardly ever see teardowns in many of those neighborhoods - there's maybe one or two a month at the Plan Commission where someone is tearing down a house in a neighborhood like Midvale or Shenk-Atwood to replace it with another small scale structure like another house. It's just rare to find a house where the economics are even at all close to working to replace a single house with something relatively small. And furthermore, it's not easy to convert a ranch into a duplex. Change in most of our residential districts will be slow. 

(The downtown is a different story - the latest Core Spaces project will finish off the last detached houses on Johnson up to Broom, but even that area is moving slow. Going on Johnson Street from the UW to State St looks dramatically different than it did 25 years ago, but once you get east of Wisconsin Ave, it's hardly changed at all. But give it another 25 years, or even 10 years!)

Part III: Ownership Opportunities

If a future council decides to make this change, what I think will be one of the big motivations is to increase opportunities for ownership. Recent Councils have made strong arguments for just overall increasing the number of housing units available and to pair them with access to transit, and that's incredibly important and we need that housing and we need more of it. And with Transit Oriented Development, the 2021 permitting reforms to streamline approvals and increase density, Accessory Dwelling Units, the new building heights affordability bonus - all of these minor tweaks really add up to creating more opportunities for more housing units. 

Allowing for duplexes and twins everywhere would continue this density argument by allowing for more units in the same amount of land - but one key difference is allowing duplexes in more places would be more effective at also increasing ownership opportunities. We'd see instances where two different families owned one side of the duplex, and I think we'd see a lot of instances where the owner occupied one side and rented out the other side. 

There haven't been a lot of condos built in Madison recently, so most of the ownership opportunities are in single family houses, and we know that prices for those are beyond many people's finances. There was news recently that only 1 in 5 homes sold nationally in 2022 were "affordable",  that is, would have monthly payments of no more than 30% of the median income for the area. 

As we think about home affordability, there are exactly 4 things (and only 4 things) we can to do as policy to address it:

1. We can make it cheaper to build single-family houses, mostly by sprawling more across the county and hoping that keeps land prices in check. Construction costs are rising (faster than inflation) and that's a topic for a whole other blog post.

2. We can keep the population the same by not building any more housing in the City's boundaries and let the market solve the problem, e.g. richer people move in and poorer people move out. 

3. We can make it worse to live in Madison and cause housing prices to go down as people leave

4. We can build more denser housing and take advantage of efficiencies in land, construction, and infrastructure costs

No one wants to do #2 or #3 so let's ignore those. 

#1 is a hard trend to fight. Building a house is expensive, and construction costs grew at a rate faster than overall inflation. (Indeed, a big reason overall inflation went up is exactly because construction costs went up, and construction costs are a big component of overall inflation.) The cost of land has gone up because it's limited and Madison is a desirable place to live. Additionally, the cost of preparing land has gone up - it costs a lot to build foundations and level the ground and to bring in utilities and build streets and all sorts of things. We could try to lower labor costs for housing, but that's hard because we'd have to get more people to move to Madison - but we don't have enough housing for them so we'd have to pay them more to live here! So while we should be building more housing so we can have more construction workers (and nurses, and teachers, and firefighters, and more of everything) we have to build more housing so we have places for them to live before we'll see changes in costs, so there may be some temporary pain until we see long-term gain.

The boundaries and future boundaries of Madison are largely set, but we do still have a lot of land left in the County. We could decide as a region that we're willing to grow, and convert more and more farmland into single-family houses. It helps somewhat with price, at least with helping to keep land costs somewhat down, but overall construction costs are still rising quickly and now we have to build many more highways to move people around - do we want 40 miles of houses across Dane County?

Policy #4, denser housing, helps address the cost of construction by being more efficient in the construction costs. Normally we talk about efficiency with costs in big apartment buildings, but duplexes and flats can be helpful there too, and can help bring costs down for a home that feels more like a house than an apartment. 

Part IV: Three other topics: Rowhouses, Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), and Renters

One thing I regret not doing with the Transit-Oriented Development Overlay District, and think that should be in the mix for the future, is permitting Single-Family Attached Buildings in more places, e.g. permit rowhouses and townhouses in more places. TOD does permit rowhouses in one zoning district type where they aren't normally permitted, but in retrospect I wish we had permitted them in more places. 

I also wanted to clarify that permitting duplexes and flats city-wide has absolutely nothing to do with renters and nothing would change with respect to that. Some people think that renters are prohibited in "single family zoning districts" but that's not true. A house in any district might be occupied by the owner or it might be occupied by a renter. And with a duplex or a two-unit flat, they might be treated as a condo and both sides might be occupied by an owner or might both be occupied by renters. The recent family definition change is also a topic for a larger blog post, but I'll just say that the pressure to rent in Madison is such that even if the change hadn't gone through, it's still likely that there are enough families looking to rent that single-family houses, duplexes, or two-unit flats would have had no trouble being rented.

Finally, it's sometimes said that Madison has effectively already eliminated single family zoning because accessory-dwelling units (ADUs) are already permitted in all of the residential districts. And in a way, that's sort of true, but it's a bit more nuanced than that.

An ADU can come in two forms. What most people think about when they hear 'ADU' is a separate building in a backyard - maybe an old garage got upgraded into a building fit for human habitation, with a kitchen and a bathroom and bedroom. This is a 'detached' ADU.

There are other forms an ADU can take that are attached to the main house. You can have a basement apartment be an ADU, or convert an attic or space over a garage into an ADU, or have an addition off to the side of your house as an ADU. Here's a diagram from the City's ADU Frequently-Asked Questions document:

https://www.cityofmadison.com/dpced/economicdevelopment/documents/ADU%20Frequently%20Asked%20Questions.pdf

There will be some cases where the line between "is this an ADU or is this a two-unit building (e.g. a flat)" will be a hard call to make and the City Zoning Staff might have to really dig into it and make a call. 

So, you might already be living next to a building with two units in it and someone renting one of the units. 

The main difference between an ADU and a duplex or a flat are that ADUs have to meet two important requirements: An ADU can only be up to 900 square feet and no more than two bedrooms, and an owner must occupy either the main unit or the ADU. 

This second requirement is in particular a big difference between a flat and an ADU. Duplexes and flats elsewhere in the city don't have to have an owner in one of the units, they might both be rented. (Both sides of a duplex might also be owned and occupied by two different people, which can't be done with an ADU either)

This owner-occupancy requirement in practice limits the number of ADUs in the city, and might be a long-term challenge. For one, not everyone wants to be a landlord and so might not want to deal with having an ADU on their property. I'm also a little bit nervous about what ADUs are going to do to homes when they come up for sale. If an owner uses home equity to create an ADU in their property, when it comes time to sell, you're almost certainly going to have to sell only to someone who is also planning to continue to be an on-site landlord, because they won't be able to afford the payment without the rental income. ADUs are new enough in Madison that I don't think this is a problem yet, but I am long-term worried about it, and I wonder if this same worry is preventing others from creating an ADU on their property.

With the TOD, Alder Evers pushed very hard to have the same owner-occupied requirement in place for duplexes and flats that would be created in the TOD, just like we do with ADUs. He was not successful, but if a future council moves to permit duplexes and flats across the city and eliminate single-family zoning, there may also be a push to add an owner-occupied requirement to one of the units. 

There's also a good argument to be made for eliminating the owner-occupancy requirement of ADUs. If the goal is to increase housing units, and if there sites that could economically be modified accommodate an ADU - think places that could cheaply add in a basement apartment, if one of the obstacles is the owner does not want to be a landlord, then perhaps we should allow someone who is willing to be a landlord to own the property and rent out both the main unit and the ADU. I don't think that's likely to happen in Madison for a number of years, however.  

Part V: Looking ahead to the future

I (Alder Paulson) am posting this in April of 2023 about a week before I leave office, so if eliminating single family zoning happens in Madison, it won't be because of anything I did. 

I did think a lot about proposing it during the Transit-oriented development overlay district debate. I decided against it, because it was late in the process and TOD was already causing enough heartburn that I did not want to upset the apple cart and risk TOD overall.

When I set out to write this post, I thought that I was going to make a prediction as to if the 2023-2025 council was going to move forward with eliminating single family zoning. However, I've decided I'm not going to make any predictions so that I'm not setting any expectations on what the next Council does. Certainly there are members who want to make the change, members who don't want to make the change, and I think some members who might be open to making the change but who want to say "let's take a breather on zoning changes". So my only prediction is "Maybe", which I get is not a very satisfying prediction. 

Permitting duplexes and two-unit flats (and maybe townhomes/rowhouses) in all of the residential districts would be a modest change that in my opinion would have some serious benefits from Madison. If it's proposed, be it in the 2023-25 Council or in some future Council, I think in the end it could be broadly supported. I hope that when the debate comes, it can stick to the facts and we can have a good, informed discussion as a community about the benefits and likely changes. I hope that this blog post might be useful for alders, commissioners, and community members in the future and helps inform that debate, and that it's a debate Madison can be proud of.