Live, Play, Work: The Housing Hat Trick
A Charlotte Project Shows The Magic of Mixed-Use Zoning
Tesho Akindele was a professional soccer player who starred for Dallas FC and Orlando City from 2014 to 2022. In the lead-up to one of his final games, he wore a shirt that had YIMBY Twitter’s hearts abuzz. We’re a bunch of zoning nerds and so a professional athlete shouting out to us was extremely cool!
And then Tesho did something amazing…. after retirement, he got into housing development and he might be even better at that than he is at soccer. The Camp North End project in Charlotte that he is a part of is a model for new housing and shows, in an especially clear way, the value of mixed-use zoning. Here’s what that looks like.
There’s housing so that people can live. There are amenities so that people can shop, eat, and recreate. There are businesses so that people can work. And they are right next to each other and mixed amongst each other. That creates vibrancy, shorter and more pleasant commutes, and economic activity.
If you’ve been to Europe and really liked it, there’s a good chance that the thing you really liked and probably didn’t even realize that it’s what you were liking is mixed-use zoning. As one study points out, in Europe, land-use regulation is mixed use by default.
In contrast, in much of America –particularly in housing constrained areas like California — mixed-use is heavily regulated against. Consider these maps of Paris and of the Palo Alto to Cupertino area of California respectively.
The blue areas in Paris are those that allow mixed-use zoning:
The pink areas in the Palo Alto-to-Cupertino are single-family homes only:
This is not a California anomaly. As M. Nolan Gray, author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, writes: “walkable, mixed-use, reasonably dense development patterns….are outright prohibited under most American zoning codes.” That’s a real shame because mixed-use zoning has a wide range of benefits.
Creating Lots of Winners
There is considerable evidence that, done well, mixed-use development makes people happier.
Renters and first-time homebuyers benefit from the increase in housing supply. And there is huge potential for added benefits here. According to the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, if we redevelop just 20 percent of the country’s underutilized commercial corridors to mixed-use sites with ten housing units per acre, we could add more than one million homes.
It’s good for workers who can live closer to their jobs and thus enjoy shorter, less stressful commutes. The shorter commutes and reduced car usage are good for the climate. It’s good for businesses who benefit from increased foot traffic. It’s good for seniors. They can maintain independence longer in a walkable environment than in a car-dependent one and walking has well-established health benefits for seniors too.
It’s good for taxpayers. An analysis of 17 different studies found that mixed-use zoning saves taxpayers a third of upfront infrastructure costs, 10 percent on ongoing maintenance, and generates ten times as much tax revenue per acre compared to traditional single-family, residential only zoning.
It’s good for property owners. Mixed-use zoning increases property values. That’s because there is high unmet demand for living in areas with mixed-use zoning. That preference is more widely shared than some might imagine. 60% of Houston residents say that they would prefer to live in a mixed-use development as opposed to single-family only zoning.
Renters, first-time homebuyers, workers, businesses, seniors, the climate, taxpayers, and property owners. That’s a long list of winners from having more mixed-use zoning. Not everyone wants to live in a place like Camp North End and that’s fine. But lots of people do want to live in places like that, and with less restrictive zoning regulations that allow for more mixed-use development, private sector developers will gladly create a greater supply of these kinds of areas to meet that demand. A city that leans into capitalism is a city that will de facto be leaning into this kind of very attractive mixed-use development.
What Policymakers Can Do
Better land-use regulations to facilitate more mixed-use development could include relaxing density limits, reducing use zoning, expediting reviews, streamlining environmental review (since denser mixed-use zoning is inherently pro-environment), form-based codes, and moving more land-use regulation to the state rather than local level in places like California and New England that struggle with recalcitrant NIMBYs at the local level.
There’s also a lot that we can learn from other countries. In Arbitrary Lines, M. Nolan Gray argues that the liberal, nationally determined nature of Japanese zoning is particularly effective compared to what we do in America.
Likewise, Matt Yglesias points out that:
“One of Italy’s real strengths seems to be a lot less fussiness about the idea that everything needs to be in the right little box. Every Italian community I saw contains a mix of detached houses, townhouses, and apartments. Every Italian community I saw contains a blend of old and new structures. It’s maybe a consequence of the country’s architectural legacy lasting for thousands of years that while you do see massive investment in preserving old things, you don’t have hangups about the fact that the buildings across the street from the Colosseum don’t match the “neighborhood context” of the Flavian era.”
Colorado and Maryland Show the Way
Finally, it should be noted that encouraging mixed-use zoning complements other exciting reforms that cities and states are doing right now.
Colorado has just passed a raft of reforms that relax density limits around train and bus stops, blocking local rules that prohibit accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and eliminating parking minimums. Maryland has just passed its Housing Expansion and Affordability Act that facilitates more housing development and specifically more transit-oriented development.
While speaking about Camp North End, Marcus Jones, Charlotte’s City Planner, said “when we started to look at Camp North End, it was ‘what do people want in terms of what they have on their day-to-day basis’” and asserted that it was important with regards to “the future and which cities are going to be those cities that win in terms of retaining talent and attracting talent.”
People like being able to live, work, and play conveniently close to each other, with their housing being affordable, their commute being short, and fun amenities they enjoy being nearby. And that doesn’t have to be a reality just for the affluent and the rich. The middle-class and working-class can have that too. We just have to let developers build it.
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