Ambitious Housing Proposals Are Passing Across the Country

The Connecticut General Assembly’s most far-reaching housing bill in years is sitting on Gov. Ned Lamont’s desk. His fellow Democrats are waiting anxiously to see whether he will sign it.

The bill, a multilayered effort to increase housing supply and lower the cost of living, has been brewing in the Connecticut legislature for years. A centerpiece is a provision that would assign each town a certain number of housing units and require them to zone for them. Connecticut has one of the lowest apartment vacancy rates in the country and a shortage of around 95,000 units that are affordable for low-income people.

The bill also reduces parking requirements for developers, allows for commercial-to-residential building conversions and promotes denser housing development near transit stations. “We tried to do many things at the same time,” says Antonio Felipe, a Democratic state representative from Bridgeport.

It’s been a big year for state housing bills, an acceleration of a trend in which both red and blue states are passing more forceful policies to promote housing construction. The biggest states — California and Texas, in many other ways political opposites — are both on the verge of enacting substantial changes that lawmakers hope will make housing development easier, cheaper and denser, and provide more low-cost options to residents.

Salim Furth, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank at George Mason University, says he’s tracking hundreds of pieces of legislation related to housing supply and affordability that have been introduced in statehouses this year. Around 70 of them have been enacted and another 30 have been approved in both chambers but not yet signed by a governor. Republican-controlled Montana recently adopted a new set of housing policies that limit local zoning control, following up on a series of Yes in My Back Yard measures in 2023 that’s come to be called the “Montana Miracle.” Florida adopted updates to its 2023 Republican-led zoning overhaul. New Hampshire Republicans are pushing to limit local zoning regulations on multifamily housing. The list goes on.

There’s been a “normalization” of state intervention into local policy, says Michael Andersen, a researcher at the Sightline Institute, a think tank focused on sustainability in the Pacific Northwest. “Change is scary, and yet we’re all dealing with the consequences of the status quo all across the West,” Andersen says. “The state’s job is to coordinate the interests that spill across city lines, and housing is one of them.”

Much of the legislation this year, in keeping with the state-level trend over the last several years, would pre-empt some aspects of cities’ zoning and regulatory power in an effort to reduce red tape for builders. Around a third of the 100 or so bills that legislatures have approved so far would streamline permitting processes in some way. Another two dozen would make changes to building codes. Measures include allowing certain multifamily apartment buildings to be built with a single staircase. Around 15 would permit accessory dwelling units, a popular policy proposal over the last several years.

States have traditionally left zoning authority to cities. But as housing costs have risen, many advocates have come to see local regulations as the culprit. States are increasingly taking on the task of prying some land-use power back from localities. One obvious benefit of that approach is that state-level policies affect a much larger area than local ones.

“Town-level reforms are really important, but boy, you can get a lot further if you do one thing at the state level than if you go town by town,” Furth says. “The big limit of state action is, if cities don’t want to go along with the state vision, there are a lot of ways for them to avoid complying with the spirit of the law.”

Changes in Blue States

Democrats have controlled Connecticut state government for years. They passed a package of zoning reforms in 2021, but have sought to do more in the last few years as affordability has become an even more pressing concern in the state and around the country. The fault lines in the debate about how to approach the issue are political but also geographical: All Republicans voted against the recent bill, but so did some Democrats. Since its passage, Lamont has received a wave of complaints from suburban communities, traditionally a base of political support for him. He reportedly wants revisions to the bill, and the deadline for him to sign or veto is getting closer.

“A lot of us are just counting down the days,” says Felipe. “We know that bill is on the governor’s desk. We know he likes the policy, and we know he’s in a tough spot. But we hope he does the right thing.”

California has also been a hotbed of housing-related animosity between cities and the state in the last decade. The state has sued cities for blocking certain housing projects; cities have sued the state in response. At the legislative level, some Democrats, led by state Sen. Scott Wiener, have spent years chipping away at local regulations they see as obstacles to more housing development. This year, the state Senate passed a bill that would allow construction of taller buildings near high-frequency transit stations, an attempt to promote lower-cost housing and transit ridership. The bill, which passed with no votes to spare, is a version of a policy Wiener has been promoting for over a half-decade. Although it has yet to receive full approval, Wiener is calling it “an idea whose time has come.”

Legislatures in Western states, where housing has been especially unaffordable, have been active in housing policy over the last few years. In addition to zoning deregulation, California, Washington and Oregon have all passed stricter rent stabilization policies. Montana has acted to limit local zoning following a housing task force appointed by GOP Gov. Greg Gianforte. This year, the Idaho Legislature created a new committee to study housing supply and affordability problems.

A Blockbuster Year in Texas

Texas, meanwhile, has had a blockbuster year for housing policy. Marquee housing-related bills that would apply to the state’s largest cities include SB 840, which allows housing development in commercially zoned areas, and SB 15, which amends the minimum lot sizes in certain cases to let developers build more homes per lot. Imposing large minimum lot sizes have long been a way for cities to maintain exclusivity.

The debate about housing affordability has taken a few years to attract Texas lawmakers’ attention, says Felicity Maxwell, executive director of Texans for Housing, an advocacy group. But this session, she says, “Everyone was much more prepared for the discussion.” Although advocates and lawmakers are still waiting to see which bills Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will sign, they’re hopeful that a raft of new policies will lead to more homes being built, resulting in lower costs to rent or buy.

“If Texas can do it, that’s a great boon for everybody,” Maxwell says. “We’re making an actual dent in the need for housing across the country.”