The Uptown paper of record today features not one but two odes to the joys of inclusionary zoning, the process by which local planners gain even more control over what gets built where.
The cover story is that inclusionary zoning is all about “affordable housing” — but we know that cannot be true because the same local planners and advocates routinely rampage against front-load garages, vinyl siding, and demand five-foot sidewalks and other amenities which drive up the price of housing.
No, as it has been deployed elsewhere, inclusionary zoning is a means by which planners can intensify their social engineering efforts by mandating that “affordable housing” be included in all new housing developments. This attempt to end-run market demands always and everywhere has the effect of pushing up the overall price of housing as developers still must recoup their fixed costs.
I saw this process at work up close while living in the inclusionary zoning poster-child of Montgomery County (Md.) for a decade. In fact, I came away convinced that the policy was primarily about trying to artificially inflate housing prices by restricting supply of the homes that the market demanded. The higher prices then resulted in yet higher property tax revenue for local officials. Profit.
The process was clear enough. If you intended to build 100 homes priced at $300K each, the zoning regs would mandate that you build, say 10, priced at $150K. Builders would simply take the $150K hit in the total revenue that they expected and spread it across the remaining 90 homes by bumping up sales prices by a couple grand.
But in the bargain local planners and inspectors gained tremendous leverage over the building process. Developers who played along and provided exactly the features and amenities officials wanted, saw their projects approved. It devolved into quite the corrupt little operation.
I’m sure that could never happen in Charlotte. Put another way, somehow I doubt plans to put $150K housing in Dilworth ever get off the ground.
