INCLUSIONARY ZONING part 1

INCLUSIONARY ZONING

By Steve Wright

Working as a firefighter, school teacher, retail salesperson or entry-level professional has never been considered dishonorable in America.

Wanting to live in a healthy community with access to the best jobs, schools, cultural activities, transit and more has always been viewed as a worthy pursuit in this nation.

But with a vast number of jobs offering middle to low wages and a great amount of new housing being built in price ranges reachable by only the middle and upper class, the gap between working class wages and desirable neighborhood affordability is widening each day.

From large urban centers to new growth areas, the police officer and the other backbones of the workforce cannot begin to dream of buying even a one bedroom condo or a small cottage.

To try to level the playing field, hundreds of cities have created Inclusionary Zoning (also known as Inclusionary Housing) as a way to create a percentage of affordable units intermingled with the market rate units and their skyrocketing price points.

Inclusionary Zoning has dozens of forms, but most typically a development with a certain threshold of units – often 10 or more – is required to offer affordable units – usually 15 percent --- to households earning roughly between 60 to 120 percent of the area median income.

Quite often, such mandatory Inclusionary Housing requirements come along with developer incentives such as increased density, expedited permitting and reduced or waived inspection fees.

To some, Inclusionary Zoning is the means to preserving a healthy mix of diverse incomes, ethnicities and work forces in increasingly pricey municipalities.

To others, Inclusionary Zoning is an impediment to growth, an interference on the free market and an exceedingly expensive cost-per-unit way of integrating lower incomes into high land value areas.