By Michael Fisch
innovation
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winter 2023
The nation’s affordable-housing crisis, which is especially pressing in places like Greater Boston, requires data-driven solutions that government officials, housing advocates, and interested citizens can use to understand the zoning regulations in their towns and across the country.
“There are multiple zoning elements that affect the kind of housing that can go on a lot,” Professor John Infranca says. They include parking constraints, maximum building height and lot coverage, floor-to-area ratios, and occupancy limitations, he says. “There’s no simple way to look at all that zoning data in one place and to easily see trends across cities, states, or regions, and that makes government planning and practical solutions around affordability a challenge.”
Seeing how few areas allow for less-expensive multi-family housing can help build support for needed reforms and target those efforts, he says.
To help address the data problem, Infranca, an expert in zoning and land use law, received a grant from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to train 14 students as zoning researchers. They will closely read and code zoning ordinances throughout Massachusetts and create the Massachusetts Zoning Atlas, a publicly available, digital mapping tool.
The atlas will interface with the online National Zoning Atlas. The tool allows users to search a map as one would on Google and filter the results to provide information, including the types of permitted uses (for example, single-family only versus multi-family), median household income, percentage of individuals spending more than 30% of their income on housing, and percentage of people of color.
“The atlas will provide a vivid representation of how much of Massachusetts—even in areas near public transportation—is zoned exclusively for single-family housing, with large minimum lot sizes,” Infranca says. By better pointing out those factors, which can contribute to a lack of housing affordability, he hopes officials might be spurred to change zoning codes.
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