(Updated at 4:30 p.m.) Arlington County is gearing up to make a decision on whether to rezone areas that only allow single-family detached homes.
And the debate has gotten fierce.
Proponents say the changes will give renters, middle-income residents and many people of color a fighting chance to buy in Arlington. Opponents say the plan will forever change local neighborhoods, won’t serve lower-income residents, will displace seniors and and people of color, and will cut the county’s tree canopy.
Two cities — Portland, Oregon (pop. 641,162) and Minneapolis, Minnesota (pop. 425,336) — have walked this path before, enacting similar policies in 2020 and 2018, respectively.
Both policies were described as controversial, as local officials considered whether to adopt them. In Portland, concerns over displacement of low-income renters led some officials to vote against the changes. In Minneapolis, support for the change among local officials was near-unanimous despite some vocal opposition, deemed NIMBYism in a 2019 article in The Atlantic.
Since then, both municipalities have clocked a modest number of “middle housing” units. A similar story could play out in Arlington, where the county estimates about 19-21 units could be built per year, but support for and opposition to “Missing Middle” continues to intensify.
“Our goal wasn’t really to drastically change the landscape of our primarily single-family neighborhoods,” Jason Wittenberg, the manager of Code Development for the City of Minneapolis, tells ARLnow. “It was always our expectation that duplexes and triplexes would be added in a very incremental way, which is how that has played out.”
He noted that both proponents and opponents “are a little surprised by the fact that it’s not a real rapid change.”
In a typical year, Minneapolis grants permits for over 3,000 new housing units. The 64 duplexes, or 128 units, built over the past 2.5 years as a result of the zoning change are “a small fraction of the overall housing supply,” Wittenberg said.
“Our feeling is that this is not insignificant,” he said. “Over time, that’s hundreds of units between now and 2040 that wouldn’t have existed.”
Meanwhile, there’s been a drop in single-family home construction, which predated the adoption of the new zoning laws and likely had to do with the pandemic, civic unrest in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, supply chain shortages and rising construction costs, Wittenberg said.
This “it’s more than the status quo” sentiment is shared in Portland.
From Aug. 1, 2021 to Aug. 1, 2022, slightly less than half of new development consisted of “middle housing,” according to a presentation by city planner Sandra Wood during a conference hosted at George Mason University earlier this month.
Of the 196 sites developed or redeveloped, 89 had two to four units on them, yielding 289 units.
“Two hundred more units were built on those middle housing sites than would otherwise have been built, had this all been redeveloped, they would’ve just been single-family houses,” Wood said at the time.
That fits with the overarching reason for the zoning changes in Portland.
“Overall, what we’re aiming for is to increase access to more types of housing in all Portland neighborhoods, allowing more units at lower prices on every lot, and applying new limits to the building scale and heights and reducing displacement overall, which we don’t know the results of yet, but we will be monitoring,” Wood said.
The most common new housing type in Minneapolis is the duplex. About half of duplexes were built in zones that were formerly restricted to single-family homes, Wittenberg said.
Meanwhile, the most common “middle” housing type in Portland is a quadplex.
“We expected duplexes might be because of our small site sizes but fourplexes have outstripped duplexes by quite a bit,” Wood said.
Prior to the ordinance updates, Portland’s lowest-density neighborhoods allowed single-family homes, accessory dwelling units and corner-lot duplexes. The ADU program has been successful, she said, with 5,000 ADUs built so far.
Similar ADUs have started popping up in Arlington since the Arlington County Board approved them in 2019, but developers and economists say the building rate has been hampered by county policies and financing hurdles.
