New Tools To Visualize How Your City Could Benefit From Incremental Development
America’s ongoing housing affordability crisis has led to a flurry of policy action from the local to the state level, in an attempt to rethink the prevailing land-use policies that have locked neighborhoods in statis and contributed to the housing squeeze. One of the most promising and necessary directions for reform is the re-embrace of incremental development: gradually adding homes to existing neighborhoods, instead of relying only on large-scale redevelopment or brand new suburban expansion.
This approach—essentially to re-legalize what was once the prevailing model of growth in U.S. cities—has appeal across ordinary partisan and ideological lines. The Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) calls it “light touch density” and has been producing some top-notch research on the potential and viability of incremental development to meet housing needs.
Now, the AEI has released a set of new, free data tools to help you visualize the need for incremental growth where you live, and communicate the potential benefits to leaders in your community. It’s called the Housing and Economic Analysis Toolkit (HEAT). Strong Towns readers might find these tools—which contain nationwide data sets, including many small towns as well as big metro areas—useful and interesting. I encourage you to check them out.
If you’re in California and want to learn more about these tools and AEI’s housing research, as well as discuss the potential for recent legislation (such as SB 9 and SB 10) to accelerate incremental development in California’s cities, the AEI will be hosting a series of mini-conferences throughout the state next week. Full information and a link to register are available here. The dates are:
Monday, September 19: San Francisco
Tuesday, September 20: Sacramento
Wednesday, September 21: Fresno
Thursday, September 22 (morning): Riverside
Thursday, September 22 (evening): West Hollywood
Friday, September 23: San Diego
You can explore the HEAT toolkit on your own here at the AEI’s website. Here’s a preview of some of the data available.
Walkable Oriented Development
The best places for incremental development are near existing clusters of destinations. We can enhance existing walkable neighborhoods by allowing more people to live in them, and create walkability by adding homes near where there are already thriving businesses. By focusing on walkable development, we also mitigate some of the most common-cited objections to new housing, such as its potential to generate traffic.
This interactive, nationwide map identifies thousands of such clusters, in the smallest towns and the biggest cities, where walking-oriented development has potential to thrive.
New Home Construction and As-Built Density
One of the biggest drivers of housing unaffordability is the steady rise over decades in the average size of newly built homes. This tool, for dozens of counties across the U.S., allows you to analyze the relationship between home size (square footage), density of development, and home price for single-family homes and townhouses built since 2000. The pattern seen virtually everywhere is straightforward: a downward-sloping gradient, in which allowing more “gentle density,” by legalizing smaller lots and missing-middle housing, corresponds to progressively smaller and less expensive homes: the kind of new construction that is most needed to fill the “starter home” gap in the market.
Job and New Construction Growth
One good measure of the depth of your city or region’s housing shortage is the gap between job growth and housing construction. In places that aren’t adding homes at pace with job growth, housing costs rise, people are displaced or prevented from moving in, and people who do live in the region are pushed to farther-away neighborhoods with long commutes. AEI’s HEAT toolkit includes an interactive map that allows you to easily contrast where jobs have been added in recent years with where housing has been built.
For example, these images from the San Francisco Bay Area show the extreme dearth of home building in the job centers of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Silicon Valley, while far-flung exurbs like Tracy meet the Bay Area’s spillover housing needs.
Play with the tools yourself, check out your home city or region, and let us know what trends you find!
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.