The Rules Designed for Skyscrapers Are Blocking Duplexes

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner recently spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference to a room filled with leaders in finance, business, philanthropy, technology, health and public policy. His focus was housing affordability, specifically the federal regulatory barriers that slow multifamily housing development, increase costs and make affordable housing harder to build.

He’s right to point to the problem.

Over time, we’ve layered housing development with procedural requirements, overlapping reviews, financing conditions, engineering standards, environmental assessments and legal hurdles that make it increasingly difficult to build housing at all. Those barriers don’t just delay projects. They drive up costs, and those costs are ultimately passed on to residents.

But there’s an important distinction local governments should pay attention to: many of the barriers HUD is focused on were written with giant leaps in mind. Massive multifamily projects with hundreds of apartments. Large regional developments backed by federal subsidies and institutional financing. Projects supported by consultants, attorneys, engineers, and compliance teams capable of navigating years of process.

And to be fair, projects at that scale often deserve substantial scrutiny.

The problem is that many cities apply the same mindset and often the same complicated procedural systems to the incremental developer trying to renovate a duplex, attempting to add a backyard cottage, or trying to build a starter home on an empty lot.

The result is predictable.

The people most capable of making small, productive investments in neighborhoods are often the least equipped to survive the process required to do it.

A local builder attempting to add a handful of homes should not have to navigate systems designed for billion-dollar development. Yet in many communities, small-scale housing faces the same zoning barriers, parking mandates, public hearing requirements, discretionary approvals, and delay-filled processes imposed on projects operating at an entirely different scale.

Cities often talk about housing affordability as though it is primarily a state or federal problem. But many local governments already control some of the very rules driving up costs and suppressing housing production in the first place.

That is what makes this conversation so frustrating.

Yes, some housing barriers are deeply embedded in federal law, financing structures, environmental review requirements, and legal systems that may take years or even acts of Congress to change.

But cities should not use that complexity as an excuse for inaction.

Most local governments already have the authority to make practical reforms that allow incremental housing growth to happen again. Strong Towns outlines several of these in the Housing-Ready City Toolkit, including allowing duplexes and triplexes by right, permitting accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in residential neighborhoods, legalizing starter homes, eliminating excessive lot size requirements, repealing parking mandates, and streamlining approval processes.

These are not radical ideas. They are intentionally incremental reforms designed to legalize the kinds of development patterns that built many of our most beloved neighborhoods in the first place.

And cities across North America are already demonstrating what this looks like in practice.

Fayetteville, Arkansas, legalized ADUs and reduced lot size barriers to allow incremental neighborhood growth. South Bend, Indiana, streamlined approvals and developed preapproved housing plans that can now be permitted in minutes instead of months. Atlanta reduced parking requirements, making small cottage developments financially viable. Kalamazoo, Michigan, reformed ADU rules, lowered lot size requirements, reduced parking minimums, and empowered local builders to begin reinvesting in vacant lots again.

None of these cities solved the housing crisis overnight, but they changed the trajectory. More importantly, they changed the mindset.

Instead of regulating every housing project as though it were a giant leap, they began creating systems capable of allowing small bets, gradual adaptation, and local reinvestment to happen again.

That shift matters because strong towns are rarely built through one massive project promising transformation overnight. Strong towns are built through thousands of small acts of investment made by local people over time.

A city that learns how to process a small infill project efficiently is building institutional capacity. A planning staff that learns to distinguish between a regional megaproject and a corner lot reinvestment project begins making more proportional decisions. A council that sees incremental success becomes more willing to tackle larger structural reforms later.

Housing abundance does not emerge from a single grand solution. It emerges from communities that make it easier for many small investments to happen simultaneously. The best housing reform conversations should not begin with the question, “How do we eliminate regulation?”

Instead, they should begin with a simpler one: Are we regulating a giant leap, or accidentally stopping a small step?