‘Your City Could Be Better’: How One City Beat Restrictive Zoning — Presented By City Cast Nashville

This is your city could be better because it could be. I'm David Plotz. If you love your city and still complain about it, you're in the right place. Zoning is one of the most boring and important facts about living in a city or living anywhere, really. Almost no one understands zoning, but it can be what decides whether you have a factory next door or an apartment building or a mansion. And I've been looking for a way to talk about it on your city could be better. And that is why I'm thrilled to have Eli Sabin as my guest today. As an alder in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, alder basically being the some kind of... archaic New England term for a city council member. Eli led a push over several years to change zoning rules in downtown New Haven, the district he represented. So, Eli, welcome to your city could be better. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, David. And before we get started, I should say that Eli and I have known each other a long time because I co-host the Slate Political Gab Fest with his mom, Emily Bazelon. So I'm glad to have a second generation podcast with you, Eli. It's an honor. New Haven, Connecticut has been governed for a long time by specific zoning laws that made it very difficult or maybe even impossible to build tall buildings downtown, even for housing. And that is until recently when... Eli, who was elected to the New Haven Board of Alders in 2019, took it upon himself to change that. So Eli's here to talk about this major win that he sees for affordability and access. So Eli, what is zoning? I'd sort of like to think about zoning as a blanket or a net that goes over the whole city as a sort of visual. You could think of there being something that is covering the whole city. basically suppressing what can be built on on any particular piece of land so zoning restricts how tall buildings can be how much of a lot they can cover and also very importantly what kind of building could go on any particular piece of land and that actually turns out to be one of the most important legal regimes in the country and policy issues that affects all of our daily lives, including where we live, how expensive our rent or our homes are, and so much else about our daily lives. It has evolved over the decades since to become much more about residential zoning and regulating the kind of homes that can be built in particular parts of any community. Is this a universal thing? Is it every place in America has zoning, and is it every place in the world has zoning? Or is it a distinctive to certain regions or distinctive to the United States? Basically, every place in America has zoning, in part because there was an effort by the federal government through a standardized zoning code that was pushed out in the early...

1900s as well. But there are some places that don't have zoning famously. Houston does not technically have zoning, but they have regime that is somewhat similar. And this is definitely something that exists, particularly in the Anglosphere in other English-speaking countries around the world. But ultimately, basically every part of the world has some kind of laws controlling what can get built on particular pieces of land. Okay. And when it comes to the United States or New Haven in particular, who controls zoning? Is that something that the feds control, the state controls, the county controls, the city controls? So zoning in New Haven is controlled at the moment by our city governments, and that is generally the case around the country. But. From a legal perspective, the powers that exist at the city level are really powers often that are just granted to the cities by state governments, as cities are creatures of the state in many cases. And so we have control over our zoning in New Haven. It could be more controlled at the state level, and that is something that there's been lots of... you know, discussion and debate over around the country in recent years. So let's go to the problem you face. So, so as you said, you were elected in 2019 and 2022, it looks like you really began to push to rezone. So what is this problem that you saw in downtown New Haven or New Haven broadly that you were trying to address? We have a huge shortage of affordable housing in New Haven. It's obviously a crisis that's facing communities across the country, but particularly in New Haven over the last. 20, 25 years, the city's been growing for the first time in a while, and there are new people moving into town with more money. And our housing stock has not kept up with the demand for places to live. And so rents have gone up substantially and the homelessness has increased and more families are getting pushed out of New Haven because of the costs of living and the cost of housing specifically. And so... Because I was representing downtown, I felt an obligation that our downtown needed to do as much as we possibly could to help address the affordable housing crisis because I thought that it would make a lot of sense for our downtown to be the place where we tried to concentrate more of the growth as we look to address the housing shortage in our city. And just before we get to how you tried to address it, is there a way you'd quantify the crisis that you saw? Yeah, we, I mean, there were some studies done that showed a shortage of, I think, 8,000 units of affordable homes in the city. There are 25,000 families on our... Sorry, just to interrupt you. You said the 8,000 units of affordable homes. Is the crisis you were trying to address an affordability crisis or just a lack of housing crisis? And why do you frame it as an affordability crisis rather than we just don't have enough places for anyone to live? Because it seems like actually one of the things that you're...

presumably trying to do is actually is not simply to get people who are going to pay you want to get people are going to get expensive housing too you want there to be a rich tax base in new haven Yeah, we're trying to build all kinds of housing as much affordable housing as possible. The biggest need from the studies that have been done in the city was on the lower income end of the income spectrum. And so our goal is to try to build as much affordable housing as possible. And we have a law in the books in New Haven that requires that new developments include at least 15% of the units as affordable housing. deed restricted, meaning they have to be rented to people with under a certain income. And so part of our goal with the Downtown for All legislative effort was to help build all kinds of housing, but especially make sure that we are building the kinds of housing that would have these deed restrictions and be available for lower income families who are really struggling to afford places to live in our city. Okay, so. I'm a builder in New Haven. What are the constraints that I as a builder have had when I've been trying to expand housing in downtown New Haven? And thus that your residents, because they are the ones who are going to move into that housing, have had. Yeah. So. FAR is a complicated zoning term that stands for floor area ratio Basically it means if you have a far of two it means you could either build a building that is two stories and covers the entire lot or you could build something that's four stories and covers half of the lot or you know it's a ratio of the area of the building over the size of the piece of land that you're trying to build on. Previously, for decades, the maximum FAR in New Haven in our downtown was six. And one of the things that I talked about a lot as we were pushing the downtown for all effort was that there are a bunch of buildings that provide really important housing in our city center, like the Taft apartment buildings, which used to be a hotel, that have an FAR that's far above six, so the Taft Apartments is around FAR of 11. And so I thought it was really important to be able to point out to people, we have these buildings right now that are providing much needed housing stock. But if somebody wanted to build a building like that right now, it would be illegal. There are also some other requirements. One, which I particularly thought was sort of... unnecessary was a requirement for amenity space. That was basically requiring developers to build the billiard room or the pool in a new apartment building, which is a nice thing to have, but definitely does not seem like something that our city government needs to be requiring in new development. So we reduced that requirement. And I don't know if you know the stuff at the top of your head, but if you look at other comparable cities, do they have...

FAR requirements, FAR requirements, and are those requirements at the same level? Is New Haven unusual? It was unusually restrictive? Is it kind of standard? Do you have any sense of that? I don't think we were all that unusually restrictive. I think actually now we are, we have one of the highest floor area ratios allowed. certainly in New England and maybe around the country for our downtown. I think I looked at a place like New Rochelle, New York, which did a big rezoning recently and has had a lot of new housing built, and they increased their floor area ratio. And so that was a place that we looked at. I will just say it's really important to think about not just what the rules are on the books, but at the end of the day, what gets built in a city like New Haven also depends on the economics of... constructing housing. So downtown for all has been in effect for several months. We're not expecting a flood of 12-story buildings to get built because our housing market is not, it's not, you know, we're not New York City or San Francisco, so the demand is not as high as it is in some of those places. But I think of... the zoning changes that we passed in some ways as a safety valve on our housing market. If the city continues to grow and more and more people want to live here, which is what we want. We want our city to be a great place to live. We need to be able to expand to meet that demand. And downtown for all makes that possible. If I decide to investigate how zoning is done in my city, is it likely that the core is something called a flora area ratio? Is that universal? It's not necessarily a floor area ratio. There are a lot of places that just have a height limit, which is a lot easier to understand. And then there's also a newer type of zoning called a form-based code that is more about providing visual aids and more architectural renderings to describe the kind of buildings that should be allowed. It's an important thing to talk about just because you can... Think about all the differences and the types of regulation that we have around the country just making it so complicated to figure out how to build new housing and that contributes to the housing shortage that we have across the country.

Concerts, bowling, and a full-service restaurant all under one roof. Brooklyn Bowl, Nashville is always a great night out, and its upcoming calendar is absolutely stacked. Pond kicks things off on August 6th with high-energy psychedelic rock. Then on August 10th, Catch Walk Off the Earth, the wildly talented pop group known for turning practically anything into an instrument. Seriously, y'all, you will never know what might make it out on stage. If dancing is more your speed, like myself, St. Lucia brings a full-on neon dance party August 12th, and Bluegrass fans won't want to miss Mountain Grass Unit celebrating the release of their new album Appalachian Smoke on August 27th. September gets even louder with Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats on September 10th. Then make a weekend of it with Rising Texas country star Braxton Keith on Friday, September 11th. followed by Nashville favorites The Weeks on Saturday, September 12th. Grab your friends, make a night of it, and get tickets now at Brooklyn Bowl.com slash Nashville. You hinted, as we were talking earlier, that, you know, you passed this in December, and of course, it does not mean there are now 8,000 new units of housing in New Haven. Is there anything on the drawing board? Has anything happened substantively since you passed this? Well, one thing that's happened is that the city got sued by a few local residents who tried to overturn downtown for all. So there is a lawsuit that's currently underway. What's their claim? What's the wrong that's been done? It's an entirely processed-based claim that there was not, that there wasn't enough notification, basically, of... residents, which is not true. And we followed all the, the city followed all the processes that are required to notify the public of a zoning change. But this is something that actually is interesting because there was a major lawsuit that delayed the Minneapolis 2040 plan, which is their major rezoning for years. And so this is a common issue with efforts to make it easier to build affordable housing because just a few people can. use a lawsuit to slow down change and delay much needed housing for years. But I think the important thing to add there to your question is the building code in this country, you have to start using steel and concrete when you go above eight stories. And so that's a lot more expensive on a per square foot basis for construction. So my expectation is that we are not going to see a ton of... very tall buildings using the new changes under downtown for all in the next couple of years probably and we may see them down the road especially if the housing market continues to worsen and things get even more expensive for families so again it's sort of a safety valve on our housing market to make sure that we don't get our housing crisis doesn't get as bad as places in California and New York and it actually gets to something that I would thinking about when I saw, oh, oh, Eli got this past, it was unanimous. That's a testament, you know, I'm sure to your hard work. But doesn't it also tell you you're too late? If you get to the point where everyone agrees on the solution, doesn't that mean the solution should have been underway decades before, that your predecessors on the board of Alder should have been dealing with this in 2015 or 2006?

I think we definitely should have taken more proactive steps to prevent the housing crisis years ago, and that's certainly true around the country. I think... The unanimous vote was really a testament to the coalition building effort that we undertook to bring so many people in our community into this effort. We spent, it took three and a half years to put this process together. You mentioned there was an article in 2022 as I was sort of kicking off this effort, talking about the vision. And then I spent three years building a coalition with my colleagues on the board of Alders. And then, you know, also to build support with the rest of our colleagues and community leaders, affordable housing experts, advocates, tenants, small business owners, people who care about our downtown and care about the housing crisis. And so the unanimous vote was really because of that work of bringing a ton of people into the effort and making sure people felt the urgency of the crisis that we're facing right now. Okay. I'm going to accept that I'm going to say that my question is correct and that every other city they should be on the on the case. To digress a second here, Eli, you're you're not a zoning lawyer. I mean, you're a lawyer, I guess, but you're not a zoning lawyer. I just graduated from law school. Okay. Well, I will not hire you to represent me. You have not passed the bar. The how did you learn about zoning? How did you decide to learn about zoning when you were when you decided oh, this is a project I'm going to take on. I need to learn about zoning like so if you if you're an aspiring city council member in in in Nashville who's listening to this what what is the course of study you recommend? Well, I got elected to the board of all desires our city council when I was 19 and I I was incredibly excited for the opportunity and the challenge of serving my hometown. I was born and raised here in New Haven. And really, because I've been hearing, you know, so many families talk about our housing crisis and that's just such a clear problem in our community, I wanted to dig in and see what the solutions could be and what our city government. could do about it and you know I've go to our first meetings and these zoning changes would come up usually it's a one-off project of some kind changing the zoning on some parcel of land that somebody wants to build some three-family house and they they need some kind of change so I started to understand that this is something that the Board of Alders has control over and Then I ended up actually writing, as I got more interested in this topic, I ended up writing my senior thesis in college about zoning issues and particularly looking at Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Berkeley, California, which had undergone...

big legislative efforts to change their zoning and so I spent a long time investigating and digging into what had gone on there with the political coalitions that had allowed housing reform to happen and certainly the David Schlaker, who has been a mentor of mine and who advised my thesis, who's a Yale Law School professor and a zoning expert has also been an incredible resource. I've spent a lot of time reading his work and talking with him about these issues as well, and many others. So you are running for the Connecticut State House, the House of Representatives, and you have a primary in just a couple of weeks on August 11th, I think that's what my note says. So how do you foresee continuing to work on these issues if you are in the state house? Like what would you be able to do at the state level that you can't do at the Alder level? Well, as we were mentioning before, city governments are currently responsible for zoning in a lot of ways, but they are creatures of the state. And so I think there's a lot more that our state government can do to push every community in the state to be more proactive about addressing the housing crisis. On the Board of Alders, I tried my best that we did everything we could to try to make sure that our downtown was building more housing and allowing for more development. There are so many towns across Connecticut that are building essentially no new housing at all, and it's definitely not any new affordable housing. And there's more of the state can do to push those towns to do more. So we need our state to step up and help provide funding to allow more affordable housing to get built as well. Okay. Last question in this main segment. What can your city could be better listeners in other cities take away from this conversation, from your zoning reform to make their own city better? I think the main lesson to take away from this is that if you have a housing crisis in your community, which in this day and age in America, the answer is probably yes. You live. You're a human being. Yes. Zoning is probably a big part of the problem. And so you should reach out to your city council member in your community or your mayor and say, I'm really worried about the cost of living. So many families in our city are getting pushed out of town. And zoning is the culprit in the large part. And we need to do something. And there are communities around the country that have done something. It's a complicated issue. There's thorny politics involved. But it's incredibly important. And we can't let the fact that it's one of the most boring things you can talk about prevent us from tackling this problem that is that is. driving up costs for families and pushing people into homelessness and distorting our economy and all of our lives Determining where people decide to live entirely based on the housing crisis So there is an opportunity in every community to lead on this issue and to do more and so I would encourage folks to reach out to their local elected officials especially because

Your local elected officials generally do not hear anybody say that they want more housing to get built in their neighborhoods or in their community. And so it's really important for you to reach out and let them know that this is something you care about. Concerts, bowling, and a full-service restaurant all under one roof. Brooklyn Bowl Nashville is always a great night out and its upcoming calendar is absolutely stacked. Pond kicks things off on August 6th with high-energy psychedelic rock. Then on August 10th, Catch Walk Off the Earth, the wildly talented pop group known for turning practically anything into an instrument. Seriously, y'all, you will never know what might make it out on stage. If dancing is more your speed, like myself, St. Lucia brings a full-on neon dance party August 12th, and Bluegrass fans won't want to miss Mountain Grass Unit celebrating the release of their new album Appalachian Smoke on August 27th. September gets even louder with Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats on September 10th. Then make a weekend of it with Rising Texas country star Braxton Keith on Friday, September 11th. followed by Nashville favorites The Weeks on Saturday, September 12th. Grab your friends, make a night of it, and get tickets now at Brooklyn Bowl.com slash Nashville. So let's go to our word on the street segment. Eli Saban, you live in New Haven. You're born and raised. As far as I can tell, you've never left it. You went to college and law school there. So you know it well. And for those of the outside of New Haven, It is famous largely because of Yale. And our pizza as well. And your pizza. And your pizza. That's true. I didn't like the hesitation that I know. No, I was trying to decide what, like if Yale is at 10, at what level is Frank Pepe is like, I don't know, like six famous compared to Yale. But good, but fair, fair point. So I want to talk about Yale, what it's like to live in a college city. So it is, it's obvious what the advantages of having Yale in New Haven are. You get economic activity. You get. rich professors living there. You get students who stay on and work and start businesses and you have a great hospital probably because you have a good medical school. I'm curious, what are the disadvantages, if any, of having such a huge and rich and powerful institution in your city? I think that... Yale plays just such a big role in our community because of the wealth that exists at the university. And it's also a little different from some other college towns that are in a bigger city where...

You know, Penn is in the entire city, Philadelphia, and has a little bit less of an impact. But Yale has just such a huge impact on our community because our city's not that big. 140,000 people. Yale owns a huge amount of property. And the growth of Yale is definitely responsible. I mean, as you're saying, for new jobs being created in the community and economic activity. But it is also responsible for the cost of living and the cost of housing specifically going up. in our city. Whenever Yale grows the size of its faculty or staff or brings new graduate students, those are people who are coming into our community with more resources often than the people who've been here for generations. And a lot of landlords in our community have been very happy to slap a coat of paint on a rental unit and a place that in like the Dwight neighborhood just outside of our downtown that has historically been a working class black neighborhood is now a lot of Yale grad students and Yale affiliated employees and staff. And so that gentrification really is definitely a consequence of the university's presence in the city. You need to make sure that if Yale continues to grow our community. is at the forefront of who benefits in terms of new jobs and also making sure our communities more affordable, safer, and has more community support for all of our families. Eli Saban, thanks for coming on Your City Could Be Better. Thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to talk in detail about downtown for all and the work that is so important at the local level across the country to solve our housing crisis and make our community more affordable. So thank you so much. That's all for today's episode of Your City Could Be Better. I'm your host, David Plotz. Our producers are Aria Brachi and Priyanka Tilvey. Our music is by Carl Christensen. If you are enjoying the show. Tell your friends, rate the show, and leave us a review wherever you get podcasts. We'll be back next week with another conversation about how your city could be better. I will now go have some New Haven pizza, which is cold in my fridge. When I moved this week, I ordered a pizza for us to eat, and it was New Haven pizza, so sitting cold in the fridge.