2 College Towns Leading the Way on Land-Use Reform

Students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

One of the most harmful legacies of America’s suburban experiment is the thicket of land-use regulations, adopted almost universally over the course of the 1950s through 1970s, that all but eliminated incremental development from U.S. and Canadian cities. This happened even in cities that predated the suburban era, and that had previously experienced decades of productive growth through the actions of many hands.

Among the most universal and the most damaging of these regulations, two stand out:

1. Exclusive single-family zoning (that is, bans on apartments or other multi-family housing in many neighborhoods).

2. Parking mandates (requirements that homes and businesses provide at least a set amount of off-street parking, regardless of whether they need it).

Every city that wants a strong future should have these policies in its cross-hairs. Follow the links above to learn more about why.

The good news: In the past few years, a rapidly growing number of cities and towns are rolling back or eliminating these longstanding policies altogether. We are witnessing the beginnings of a sea change. And taking the lead most recently, as of this writing, are two prominent college towns in very different parts of the country.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, eliminated its parking minimums citywide on August 15, by a 10–1 vote of the city council. Council member Erica Briggs told WEMU that the move should allow new housing and commercial space to be more affordable, and, by filling in lightly used parking lots and reducing asphalt, it will make the city more walkable and environmentally sound.

The parking reform is notable for Michigan, birthplace of the U.S. auto industry and a state that, according to Nat Zorach of The Handbuilt City, has been resistant to reforms that curb car dependency. It comes on the heels of a productive couple years for Ann Arbor’s city council. In 2021, the city liberalized its rules on Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) to allow up to 22,000 more homes than before to potentially add ADUs. Later in the same year, Ann Arbor relaxed its restrictions on home-based businesses, allowing a mix of uses that both lowers the bar of entry for entrepreneurs and facilitates walkable neighborhoods.

Strong Towns is shaping the conversation in Ann Arbor. During the debate on ending parking minimums, council member Linh Song brought up the value of a Strong Towns approach to parking and the use of urban land, as well as our crowd-sourced map (with the Parking Reform Network) of cities that have curtailed or ended parking mandates.

Gainesville, Florida

Meanwhile, the conversation around single-family zoning has been heating up for years in Gainesville, home to the University of Florida. On August 9, the city passed a plan by a 4–3 vote to replace the city’s single-family zoning designation with a more flexible “neighborhood residential” category that could allow up to four units on a lot, depending on the lot’s size. The plan was supported by mayor Lauren Poe, several other council members, and a local YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) group, Gainesville is for People, in which University of Florida students appear to be well-represented. Supporters argue that allowing incremental development in Gainesville’s core neighborhoods is necessary to curb rising housing costs and allow people to stay in their preferred neighborhoods. (We agree.)

The Gainesville plan was not without controversy, and nearly every news report emphasizes that the overwhelming majority of speakers at the public hearing opposed the change. (This is not surprising: public hearings have a structural tendency to be dominated by older, wealthier homeowners, and by opponents rather than supporters of whatever change is on the agenda.) In Gainesville, though, prominent voices from the Black community also opposed the plan, and some opponents have asked the state government to intercede to block it. It is clear that the conversation in Gainesville is far from settled on this issue. But the mere existence of a conversation is an important step from a few years ago.

The University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

Part of a Broader Pattern

Gainesville and Ann Arbor aren’t the only places to make news on land-use reforms that are primarily known as college towns.

Fayetteville, Arkansas, has been a leader on parking reform, and reaped great rewards for its efforts. Earlier in 2022, the Sightline Institute featured Fayetteville’s downtown in a case study, where the 2015 elimination of parking mandates has allowed for the revitalization of several commercial spaces that city planners had previously all but written off as undevelopable. We interviewed development services director Jonathan Curth about this on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.

Berkeley, California, is another city where strong activist pressure from outside City Hall, combined with the election of a forward-thinking council, has led to both the abolition of parking minimums and single-family zoning. This is noteworthy because Berkeley has an arguable claim to being the birthplace of single-family zoning in 1916, and now it is the site of a deep reckoning with how this policy has not only stifled the city’s incremental growth and fueled a housing crisis, but also entrenched longstanding patterns of racial and class segregation.

South Bend, Indiana, is not technically a college town—the famed Notre Dame University sits just outside city limits—but the ties are still strong. South Bend has been forward thinking and a model to emulate not just in altering land-use policies (parking minimums ended in 2021), but in much more broadly working to dismantle barriers to participating in the city’s revitalization. This includes simplifying and making its planning processes and zoning code more accessible to laypeople, and developing a Department of Economic Empowerment which has helped to cultivate a remarkable network of small-scale developers, contractors, and lenders—collectively equivalent to the biggest developer in the city—who are working to incrementally revitalize the city’s west and northwest sides.

Why College Towns Lead the Way

Do these and other examples amount to a pattern? Certainly not an ironclad one, but still, there seems to be something here. A few reasons suggest themselves.

Students are, of course, known for their activism and idealism. It’s not unusual for college students to be on the forefront of a reckoning with policies and practices that have become dated and harmful.

Students are also sensitive to issues of housing access and cost. They are almost universally renters, not homeowners, so they have a lot to lose from housing policies that systematically favor existing homeowners’ asset value in a tight market over housing abundance. And they have time and energy to organize against those policies. Though it’s far from only or mainly students leading the charge in these places, it does add a sense of urgency.

One other factor comes to mind, and it is that college campuses themselves are some of the best bastions of walkable urbanism in North America, and their environs are places where you have a population of people living the benefits of walkable urbanism, the kind made illegal or functionally non-viable by misguided land-use policies. Even in a place like Gainesville, a Southern town with a more spread-out and suburban built form than an Ann Arbor or Berkeley, you have a critical mass of people who walk to their classes, jobs, and local businesses, and keenly feel the importance of human-scale development in those areas around campus.

For these and other reasons, college towns are fertile ground for reforms that a much longer list of places could benefit from. And these examples, from the Deep South to the Rust Belt to the West Coast, are showing America the way.

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