Cincinnati’s Zoning Problem
One of the hottest issues on the Cincinnati political scene lately has been the affordable housing crisis. If you’re unfamiliar with what the affordable housing crisis is, there is a 28,000 unit gap between affordable housing needed and affordable housing that actually exists. Affordable housing is defined by HUD as housing in which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities. The opposite of “affordable housing” is called “market rate housing” and HUD defines that as the prevailing monthly cost for rental housing. It is set by the landlord without restrictions. There are a multitude of factors that have contributed to this crisis in our city and in our region. Real estate prices for homes have skyrocketed in the past few years and that can be attributed to simple supply and demand. The fact is there is a big demand for housing and the supply is not meeting that demand. We’ve also seen the gentrification of places like OTR and it is now moving to other places in our city like Madisonville. Affordable housing units were bought up by developers and turned into market rate housing which is more profitable. I wanted to understand this issue more in-depth and I went and found two of the wonkiest (and smartest) guys you will ever meet in Cincinnati: Mark Samaan and Nick Keeling.
Nick previously worked as a zoning official and standard planner for Hamilton County but currently serves as a service planner for Metro/SORTA. Mark also previously worked with Hamilton County as an associate planner but is now currently a Service Planner 3 for Metro/SORTA and has been monumental in the Reinventing Metro Plan as well as the expansion of Metro throughout Hamilton County. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of how to fix extremely complex problems, like fixing a dilapidated transit system that had been neglected for years or trying to figure out why our city has a huge gap in affordable housing, these two are the type of people you seek out for answers. The pair have started a project known as Legalize Housing, an Instagram page that highlights types of housing that are currently illegal under Cincinnati’s broken zoning laws.
The Legalize Housing project was born in August 2020 with the idea of showing off homes that are not permitted under modern zoning laws. “Modern zoning laws have pigeonholed development into single family homes or massive housing complexes with hundreds of units. We want to highlight the in-between housing stocks like duplexes, triplexes and four unit buildings,” Nick told me. Both Nick and Mark began to explain something known as “the missing middle housing” which is a range of house-scale buildings with multiple units, comparable in scale and form with detached single family homes, located in walkable neighborhoods. There are a variety of books on the topic, but Nick and Mark recommended Missing Middle Housing by Daniel Parolek as one of the top urban planning books on the topic.
It all began in the 1960s when the City of Cincinnati started zoning out the “middle” types of housing (duplexes, triplexes etc) and primarily began allowing single family zoning for new construction housing in an attempt to force the city to become more suburban. To make matters worse, the City of Cincinnati double downed on restricting multi-unit housing again in 2004. In addition to trying to make the city more suburban, Nick mentioned that racism and the stereotype that renters can be viewed as undesirable people were also contributing factors to these zoning changes. “Four unit structures have always existed as affordable housing in Cincinnati,” Mark explained. “But Cincinnati has a policy that if a multi-unit structure is vacant for more than a year, it is forced to revert back into single zoned housing. This is a reason Northside has seen a huge loss of units in recent years,” Mark told me. There has also been a huge explosion of market rate apartment complexes in Northside, two examples include Kirby School Apartments as well as the Gantry Apartments on Hamilton Ave.
So the question remains, how can Cincinnati solve this zoning problem that is contributing to an affordable housing crisis in our city? “It’s not terribly hard to change it,” Nick said. “Update the existing zoning codes through an ordinance change by City Hall and make it so 1-4 unit structures can be built by right so long as they meet code requirements,” Nick further explained. Mark also pointed out that zoning is something that is entirely a municipality function. “Cities can zone anything they want, anywhere as long as they have a comprehensive plan. Zoning can be updated through an ordinance and you don’t need the support from the State of Ohio. The fact that there are so many multi-family units that still exist means that there is still a demand for them,” Mark said. In the end, it sounds like fixing the existing zoning laws within the city is an obtainable goal that would help solve the affordable housing crisis. Obviously, fixing zoning laws would be a long-term strategy and it would take a few years to begin seeing the effects. I wonder why the current mayor or council has implemented such a simple fix? I, for one, am simply not smart enough to know why our mayor and council do or do not do certain things that seem so simple. But in the meantime, check out Mark and Nick’s Legalize Housing Instagram page to see some sweet multi-family homes in our city that cannot currently be built due to our city’s broken zoning laws.
