Even with his master's degree in urban planning, Eric Mai says he still gets lost in dense local zoning codes.
Zoning codes are rules made by cities to guide development. They say whether you can build an apartment building or a factory on a certain piece of land, and they’re unique to every locality.
The rules can change piece by piece over decades as new businesses ask for space or homeowners seek to raise backyard chickens.
As a result, zoning is often incomprehensible for everyday people.
That’s why Mai and think tank Housing Forward Virginia created the Hampton Roads Zoning Atlas.
The interactive map simplifies zoning to let average people see how these rules shape our cities. Mai said he hopes residents and government officials use it to look at how zoning impacts other issues.
“Okay, this is how you’re zoning for housing in your communities. Is it meeting the demands of your communities?” Mai said.
Zoning is one of the factors that can make solving the affordable housing problem difficult.
Mai points to single-family zoning, the kind that creates suburban neighborhoods where detached houses sit on their own lots and apartment buildings aren’t allowed.
The atlas shows that kind of zoning dominates Hampton Roads, encompassing 69% of developable land, Mai told a room of Hampton Roads city planners at a forum launching the atlas Friday.
“This is a bottleneck that is creating a lot of issues, so how can we look at this critically,” he said.
One way to make housing more affordable in the region, Mai said, is to loosen zoning rules to allow things like duplexes.
Mai says this kind of housing, often called “missing middle” housing for the space it occupies between single-family homes and larger apartment buildings, is hugely underrepresented in Hampton Roads.
Denser development is typically cheaper for developers to build and results in more supply, which helps keep prices down.
Mai’s analysis shows Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, both overwhelmingly full of single-family zoning, allow missing middle development on just 6% and 4% of developable land, respectively.
Most other Hampton Roads localities are even more restrictive than that.
Steve Lawson runs a housing development company in Norfolk that specializes in building affordable apartment buildings using government tax credits.
He said creating affordable housing isn't financially attractive to developers now without using the kinds of incentives his company does, but less restrictive zoning would open up options.
“Zoning is an unequivocal brick wall we run into on a regular basis,” Lawson said at the forum.
“It is the necessary change that has to happen in order to figure out how to create affordable housing.”
The Hampton Roads Zoning Atlas is the first of what is expected to become a state-wide atlas, following the lead of similar projects in places like Connecticut and Hawaii.
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