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In the past few years there has been a great deal of discussion in the planning world, and by other observers, about housing equity. Most people have become familiar with the term gentrification, and I addressed that issue in a post this past summer. But increasingly it has become evident that in many communities there is a major zoning barrier to providing more affordable homes and addressing equity issues.

In most American cities single-family housing has always occupied the largest land area. Our country has only recently become more urban, and it has been most people’s expectations that they would live in a traditional house. As a result, zoning codes in most cities have locked up the majority of the land area, and the most desirable, for single-family homes. In smaller cities and places that are not growing, this may not be a problem if housing costs have not been going up much. But where there is significant housing cost inflation, single-family neighborhoods are increasingly becoming more exclusively the domain of the white and the wealthy.

This has led to a national debate about zoning’s role in the current housing affordability crisis, as well as the implications for housing equity. Portland has done a better job than most cities of allocating significant blocks of land for affordable multifamily housing, but there is a need to ensure that we provide enough land in desirable parts of the city to accommodate the increasing need for other types of affordable housing. The Planning and Sustainability Commission has been discussing how much land and where it will be. Around the first of the year there will a new proposal for how Portland intends to address this in the future. Stay tuned.