Minjee Kim, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University. In this research news spotlight, Dr. Kim discusses her recently published article titled, “The Case for Mass Upzoning,” where she was the lead author.
This article was published as a part of a forum known as “The Price of Upzoning”, an academic space in the journal, Housing Policy Debate. This journal was created to spark discussion which features studies on topics such as housing development, affordable housing, and development trends. Below is a summary of the article written by graduate student Emma Knight (MSP 23’, MBA 24’).
In “The Case for Mass Upzoning,” Minjee Kim, Ph.D., contends that increasing development capacities of zoning districts that currently only allow for single-family, detached homes (also referred to as mass upzonings in the article) is justifiable in the United States, even if this means valuable public air rights are privatized.
Dr. Kim argues that eliminating single-family zoning districts holds a symbolic significance, a progress towards racial equity, which transcends the goal of housing production.
Moreover, Dr. Kim recognizes that transferring development rights to private homeowners can be understood as incentives for buying out homeowners who may have been opposing and preventing new housing production in their neighborhoods. This article highlights how mass upzonings are also a desirable policy solution because it is one of the most cost-effective and least politically risky strategies for tackling housing affordability and supply challenges in the U.S.
“This article is poised to directly engage with the current and lively debates around upzoning, housing affordability, exclusionary zoning, and racial equity in housing,” Dr. Kim said. “These are conversations that are actively taking place within the policy and scholarly spaces.”
Dr. Kim’s article examines how upzoning, an act of amending the local zoning ordinance to allow for denser developments, which leads to more housing units in residential zones, has become a desired policy strategy in the fight for more affordable housing. In recent years, movements to deregulate and increase densities in low-density residential districts have been growing in places such as the United States, Australia, Canada, and Brazil.
However, in this process of increasing maximum development capacities, there is a possibility that it can lead to increases in the upzoned parcel’s economic value. If more units can be built on a given piece of land, and if there is sufficient market demand for housing and other types of real estate, prices tend to rise. This also means that existing property owners will be able to sell the land parcel at a higher price.
Dr. Kim notes, “In response, critics of upzoning argue that upzoning without any strings attached is essentially transferring valuable development rights for free to private landowners … These critics also highlight how empirical evidence is mixed when it comes to the actual effect of upzoning on housing production.”
Dr. Kim’s article discusses the importance of looking at both arguments for and against mass upzoning in country-specific political, cultural, and legal contexts, which can offer practical guidance for policymakers and the public.
Dr. Kim’s article is a response to another article titled, “Land as Airspace: How Rezoning Privatizes Public Space (and Why Governments Should Not Give It Away for Free),” coauthored by Cameron Murray and Joshua Gordon (2023). Dr. Kim engages with their article by considering the authors’ arguments and supporting evidence in the historical, cultural, political, and legal contexts of the U.S.
Dr. Kim would like to see future research aimed at identifying the varying effects of upzonings depending on the geographic extent and intensities, variations in policy design and implementation details, and specific real estate market conditions.
To learn more about Dr. Kim and her work, click here, or to learn more about the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, click here.
Kim, M. (2023). The case for mass upzoning. Housing Policy Debate, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2234890)