MOIRA O'NEILL'S RESEARCH ON LAND USE ENTITLEMENT SEEKS TO ADVANCE SOCIAL EQUITY IN HOUSING DEVELOPMENT

In a recent Boston Globe article on the affordable housing crisis Associate Professor Moira O'Neill provides expert opinion on the ways that local regulations impact social equity in housing development. Referencing a recent report that she co-authored on land use entitlement, the article emphasizes the challenges of arduous planning and approval processes noting, "...there are signs that the longer a project takes to get approved, the odds are it won't satisfy the demand of affordable housing..."
 

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“The process of building new homes is full of uncertainty and unexpected obstacles,’’ Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and an expert in urban economics and housing policy, said in an early 2020 report on who is to blame for the high housing costs. “Regulatory barriers make it riskier, longer, and more expensive, which has consequences for housing affordability.’’

“Who ultimately pays the costs associated with land development — whether it comes out of developers’ profits or gets passed along to consumers of new housing — may not be immediately obvious,’’ Schuetz wrote. “What is clear is that a longer and more uncertain process increases the costs of development.’’

O'Neill's research reported in "Examining Entitlement in California to Inform Policy and Process: Advancing Social Equity in Housing Development Patterns," (Nov 2021; Revised Apr 2022) which was developed for the California Air Resources Board, details analysis from an ongoing study, the Comprehensive Assessment of Land Use Entitlements Study (CALES). CALES examines how jurisdictions approve dense housing development and details entitlement processes (often the first step to development). CALES analyzes how enforceable climate policies operate in relationship to the approval of new housing in urban cities and exurban areas, and whether new housing development in both contexts faces opposition through lawsuits.

The authors write, "Our work suggests that the chief regulatory contributor to California’s housing crisis is local governments hindering dense housing via zoning and development approval processes....But even where cities zoned more land for dense development, local regulation creates lengthy housing development approval timelines that impact the development of individual projects."

CALES focused on housing production in 16 cities and four counties. The disparity of markets and time-to-approval timelines (it can take a median of 26.6 months on average to get the nod for a five-unit-plus residential project in San Francisco compared with only 5.4 months across the bay in Oakland) creates uncertainty in the development world. Furthermore, a project would still need more approvals after this entitlement phase to get a full green light. O'Neill notes, "...the problem that Oakland highlights is maybe you don’t have to take 27 months [to approve housing]."

O'Neill and her fellow researchers have uncovered that data points to local authority over land and local regulation as the most significant barrier to increasing infill dense housing and affordable housing. They suggest that local governments could eliminate obstacles associated with state level environmental regulation (and related litigation) by reforming their own local law. Their findings indicate that none of the urban study cities they evaluated have permissive regulatory environments. Rather, most of have moderate to very stringent local land use regulations. The report includes many recommendations including streamlining mechanisms for environmental review by local governments offering a promising way to advance additional housing production in infill cities without undermining public participation or important environmental review. The promise of social equity in affordable housing development, tied to the climate goals laid out by many cities across the United States, requires reform to regulatory processes.

This fall, O'Neill will be bringing students into this national conversation and teaching them the analytical methods developed in the CALES report in a special topics course (PLAC 5500) offered in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning.