Design for Living: Housing density even in Big Sky country

Boise, Idaho is welcoming housing density.

A Yimby revolution has launched itself in America, in the red states they call the “Mountain West”: the likes of Montana, Idaho, Arizona and Utah. A movement saying “Yes In My Back Yard” to housing density, and it’s being led by the centre-right. In 2016 in Colorado, they even had a nationwide Yimby conference.

The cause is straightforward: zoning established generations ago has stopped new housing projects, except by sprawling into farms and rural wilderness, far away from jobs and in places most people want preserved. The Arizona town of Paradise Valley boasts about its “one home per acre” code.

Downtown skyline buildings in Phoenix Arizona. Photo / Getty Images

The result: there’s not nearly enough housing to meet demand and prices have gone through the roof. It’s all depressingly familiar.

The solutions are familiar too, except they’re being better received than is sometimes the case here.

In Arizona, a new law will abolish minimum parking requirements for apartment blocks and allow smaller “setbacks” so you can build closer to the edge of the section. Tiny homes (known as additional dwelling units or ADUs), single-room occupancies (SROs) and what we call townhouses and terraced housing will all be encouraged. Near transit, heights up to 25 metres will be allowed. That’s seven or eight storeys.

In Utah, the law already requires local councils to include at least three items from a prescribed “shopping list” in their zoning plans. The items include SROs and a cheaper process for subdividing a section.

Montana is about to allow mid-rise apartment buildings in all commercially zoned areas, while townhouses and smaller section sizes will be encouraged in the suburbs. Utah’s shopping-list approach to zoning will be adopted.

The aim: to encourage lots more infill housing and mid-rise apartment blocks.

Proposals like these always generate political debate, usually with a left-leaning desire for affordable housing pitted against a right-leaning wish to preserve the existing character of the suburbs and city fringe. Equity vs heritage. Those locked out vs those wanting to preserve what they have.

But in some of the Mountain West states, Republicans are leading the demand for change. Their argument: If you work hard and save, you should be able to get onto the property ladder, in a part of town where it makes sense to live. That dream is denied if the only cheap housing for sale is way out in the mountains or the desert.

Denver, Colorado.

Democrats agree and add a climate dimension. Phoenix, Arizona is already a vast concrete heat trap. Its water sources are drying up so fast, it’s regarded as the “least sustainable city in the world”. Housing density will become part of a citywide rethink of how to live sustainably in a permanent drought.

Still, there is Nimby opposition. Some density proposals have been rejected. Some city councils insist they have the right to set their own rules without interference by state governments.

But the prevailing argument is that councils have too often sided with existing homeowners, regardless of the consequences for everyone else. The “right” to do this is underwhelming when it actively discriminates against many citizens and threatens the very survival of the city.

Yimbys in Big Sky country: it seems counterintuitive. Being home on the range is in the cultural DNA of the Mountain West, if not always in people’s actual lived experience.

But the world is changing, sometimes in surprising places, and surprisingly often for the better.

Design for Living appears weekly in Canvas magazine.