WillieHilliardRVA

In the /r/yimby thread /u/theaceoface asked:

What are your views on rent control? What are your views on zoning incentives for building BMR units?

Rent control is one policy where economists are close to universal in their agreement that it’s a bad idea. It causes less housing to be built in the long term and contributes to gentrification. For anyone interested in reading about how it does this, here’s an overview of the relevant literature by the Brookings Institute. It does help some renters who are lucky enough to snag a rent-controlled unit, but the broader harm that it does to other renters and would-be residents of an area with rent control greatly outweighs the benefit to the people it helps. It’s just bad policy to ensure housing affordability, and there are other ways to ensure that people can be housed regardless of income. You raise one of them in your second question:

Zoning incentives to construct some BMR (Below Market Rate) housing is one area that is a promising tool to help ensure housing affordability across a range of income levels, if implemented correctly. Specifically, I support a policy approach called inclusionary upzoning. It basically works like this: developers are allowed to build denser housing (duplexes, apartments, etc.) on a given lot if they set aside a portion of the units for housing people with lower-incomes at a rate below what they could charge on the market.

It has a few advantages. I am opposed to the state of segregation by race and income that we too often take as a fact of life, and mixed-income developments have positive downstream effects on working- and middle-class folks’ upward economic mobility and school equity. Another advantage over upzoning without stipulations is that voters tend to be more supportive of inclusionary upzoning, and politics is the art of the possible. I aim to do the maximum amount of good possible if elected to the Richmond City Council, and a broad expansion of inclusionary upzoning is better than the much more limited, piecemeal upzoning the city has authorized in recent years.

In the /r/yimby thread /u/agitatedprisoner asked:

1) Why is the rent so damn high?

2) Why can't many people afford to live near their workplaces?

So, I am in agreement with Jimmy McMillan that indeed, the rent is too damn high. We differ in our proposals to address that.

In short, the rent is high in most metro areas because there are too many people who want to live in too little housing. Landlords can charge a higher rent than they could if there were a free(r) market for housing because of the artificial supply restriction that zoning and flat real estate taxes both contribute to.

There’s a few ways that zoning in most cities (certainly in Richmond) contributes to an inability for people to afford to live near their workplaces. First and foremost is an opposition to mixed-use zoning. In my district on the city’s Northside, in large swaths of it it is only legal to build detached, single-family homes. People live in one place, the jobs are somewhere else. This is not to mention the fact that this overly top-down approach to that is de facto central planning for land use has, when combined with lack of adequate transportation options, created food deserts. Now, there are of course a time and place for these regulations; you certainly don’t want a liquor store springing up right across the street from a school, for instance. But the extent of the regulation in Richmond and around the country far surpasses those common-sense uses for zoning.

The property tax reform that I support directly discourages using real estate as a speculative asset, by increasing taxes levied on the unimproved value of the land. Without development on a lot, fluctuations in the price of a piece of real estate are mostly the value of the land beneath a property, rather than the building itself. This tax reform does a better job of capturing any unearned gains from land speculation and therefore discourages it.

In the /r/yimby thread /u/toughguy375 asked:

How much does rent cost in Richmond? How accessible are the poor parts of Richmond to the downtown and the major businesses? What changes can be made to improve this accessibility? Does the zoning allow or encourage higher density residential and commercial development? Is Richmond encouraging more development along transportation corridors?

Rent in Richmond can vary widely by housing type and location.

There is also variability in accessibility to the core and commercial sections of the city from low-income neighborhoods, but in general it is subpar. In my district (Northside) this is the case.

To improve accessibility, as I’ve said elsewhere, we need to for starters allow people to live closer to where they work and shop by legalizing more mixed-use development. Furthermore, we need to expand the number of bus routes and the frequency of service among them, in addition to making major efforts to connect the city’s bike lanes and invest in pedestrian infrastructure. I plan to pay for this via progressive property tax reform, which you can read more about here.

Zoning in much of the city - Northside among it - generally does not allow high-density residential development or significant dispersion of commercial development. The city core is marred by regulations like mandatory minimum parking requirements - check out this map to see the result.

The city is taking steps to encourage more development along transportation corridors. Richmond’s draft plan, which has broad support, calls for the city to “prioritize funding projects that provide housing to very low-income individuals and families, including supportive housing, within a ¼ mile of enhanced transit corridors”. I believe more can be done.

In the /r/yimby thread /u/fastento asked:

What happens to property values in neighborhoods that upzone vs. neighborhoods that “preserve their character?”

There is a myth - perpetuated by none other than our esteemed President - that allowing a variety of housing types will reduce property values. It may seem like a contradiction, but upzoning both increases property values and increases housing affordability. How? Well, consider a single-family-zoned lot. If you allow the conversion of the house into a duplex, you effectively remove an artificial restriction on putting the land to more productive use. When the land has more productive potential, its value rises. Some owners in this scenario will choose to convert their property into a duplex, allowing. So if the single-family-zoned house was worth $250k, the land with the duplex might be worth, say, $400k. And so each of the two housed families’ housing costs are less than the initial, singular family’s housing costs were, and simultaneously the original owner of the property still increased their wealth during the upzoning and by developing the property.