Exclusionary Zoning and Recode

Exclusionary zoning restricts the production of new housing and caps the number of people who can live in a desirable urban area.  The wealthy outbid the poor for homes, and high prices and economic exclusion ensue.

For more than a century, municipalities across the country have crafted zoning ordinances that seek to limit multifamily (read: affordable) housing within city limits. Such policies, known as exclusionary zoning, have led to increased racial and social segregation, which a growing body of research indicates limits educational and employment opportunities for low-income households. 

Take a look at the Recode Map 2, which shows great swaths of single family zoning (light yellow.) The orange you do see is mainly what is already built. In this proposed zoning map, development of new multifamily housing of any size has been largely relegated to the six commercial corridors:  Broadway, Magnolia, Western, Central, Chapman Highway, and Kingston Pike (strands of pink.)  You will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in the city where Recode would allow construction of new multifamily by right.

MPC says that Recode opens all kinds of opportunities for development of multifamily housing along the mixed used corridors.  However, the properties along these corridors are among the most expensive within the city, high enough to make unaffordable any housing built on them.  And not every renter may want to live on a busy street.  By just looking at the map, MPC’s vision of a car-dependent, “suburbanized” central district is plain to see. Small multifamily housing plays a very small part within this vision.

The NAACP Housing Committee has expressed concern that Recode Knoxville will move the city to even greater exclusive single family housing zoning within the central sector of Knoxville by denying the right of constructing affordable small multifamily housing. Over time and through this highly restrictive zoning, Knoxville will follow the pattern of other cities in which the wealthy move back into the central city, the existing residents are displaced, and the lower income cannot afford to live in the central city.

Restricting nearly all of Knoxville’s central residential districts to single-family homes will inflate housing costs and rents, thus increasing inequity.  Neighborhoods will sort themselves out by class and race.  Such zoning will displace long-standing residents by pricing them out of their owned or rented homes.  Without affordable housing and transportation, it becomes even more difficult for working people to improve their lots in life, and more people become homeless.

Zoning in and by itself does not solve affordable housing.  Other policies are needed to encourage affordable housing development within downtown and throughout the city.  Yet zoning is fundamental.  Restricting neighborhoods to only single family homes will over time exclude affordable housing in the central areas of Knoxville because it excludes multifamily housing.

City policymakers have an obligation to carefully reassess restrictions on housing according to who wins and who loses, with special attention given to the people with the fewest resources.

The evidence seen from the experience of other cities is irrefutable. Knoxville can become an equitable and affordable city, or it can accelerate Knoxville down the proposed Recode path to exclusivity.  It cannot do both.