Sustainable Communities or the Next Urban Renewal?

Inadequate housing supply in California's most expensive metro areas drives a statewide housing crisis that challenges climate policy implementation, fair housing goals, and poverty reduction. Many scholars and policy makers agree that increasing dense infill transit-oriented residential development (TOD) in high-cost metro areas could address this housing crisis while also mitigating the impacts of climate change. But some advocates and scholars liken state policy that promotes TOD to twentieth century urban renewal-contending that state-incentivized TOD disproportionately displaces lower income communities. To explore this issue, and to examine the relative influence of both state law promoting TOD and local law regulating land use in generating inequitable outcomes like displacement, we collected land use and housing data from high-cost cities across California. Our data show that cities approve the majority of their dense housing in neighborhoods with a history of disinvestment, though not enough dense housing, particularly affordable housing, to advance climate and fair housing policy. In some neighborhoods, building new TOD housing demands demolition of existing housing, including rent stabilized housing, and this physically displaces at least some existing tenants. We conclude that state-level environmental law and planning incentives to promote infill TOD, however, are unlikely to be drivers of these outcomes. Rather, exclusionary zoning at a neighborhood level is the probable culprit. Exclusionary zoning within cities reduces the land available for dense housing; this directly limits all dense TOD to the same neighborhoods where cities have allowed dense residential development for decades. Cities reinforced early discriminatory land use policy through redevelopment initiatives that predate state-led TOD policy and seem remarkably untouched by state climate policy. Thus, local choices appear to dictate the amount, location, and pace of TOD housing development, and whether new TOD housing displaces communities. We recommend a more careful balancing between localism and state-level control over land use and zoning to correct inequitable housing outcomes and achieve California's climate and fair housing goals.