The Post-Gazette reports that the Builders Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh (BAMP) has filed an amended complaint in U.S. District Court as it continues its challenge to the City of Pittsburgh’s “inclusionary zoning” law, which proponents claim is the key to developing more “affordable housing.”
But it’s a law, that on its face, smacks of being unconstitutional and, in practice elsewhere, does exactly the opposite of what its backers maintain it will do.
The amended lawsuit, first filed in May, was updated this month. The original lawsuit by BAMP, a nonprofit trade association representing builders and developers, not only argues the city ordinance allows for unconstitutional taking of property but also is a violation of Pennsylvania’s Home Rule and Optional Plan law.
The city has claimed BAMP has no standing because the original filing could not show any plaintiffs had suffered real harm. The latest amended filing includes an Oakland plaintiff who appears to document just that.
In a nutshell, and as the P-G reports, here’s what the “inclusionary zoning” law does:
“Under the city ordinance, which started in Lawrenceville in 2019 and expanded to Bloomfield and Polish Hill last year before adding Oakland, at least 10 percent of the housing in new developments or substantial improvements involving 20 units or more must be designated for low-income residents for at least 35 years. …
“BAMP has maintained that the city was improperly seeking to shift funding for affordable housing to ‘a select population, namely residential real estate developers’ and that the ordinance amounts to an unconstitutional taking of land,” the P-G says.
The lawsuit will continue to wend its way through the federal courts. But, at its base, “inclusionary zoning” in pursuit of “affordable housing” is a well-documented public policy mistake.
As Emily Hamilton, senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, concluded in a 2019 white paper:
“Inclusionary zoning, a policy intended to address the problem of households struggling to afford housing, may actually increase house prices generally.”
In fact, no studies of “inclusionary zoning’s” effects indicate that such policies increase housing supply or contribute to broadly lower prices, the Ph.D. economist notes. “It benefits a small portion of low- and moderate-income households rather than targeting aid at the households that need it most.”
Furthermore, the urban economics and land-use policy scholar finds that serious improvement to housing affordability requires substantial land-use policy reform that will allow significantly more housing construction, including low-cost housing types.
“Under land use-policy that allows new housing to be built in response to increasing demand, inclusionary zoning would be a clear tax on construction because density bonuses wouldn’t provide an offset to developers,” Hamilton adds.
“Even under vastly liberalized housing policy, some households will struggle to afford shelter. But taxing housing construction with the goal of creating more abundant housing for people of relatively low-income levels doesn’t make sense,” she argues.
“Rather than using inclusionary zoning to appear as if they’re pursuing housing affordability, policymakers who are actually concerned about affordability should reform exclusionary zoning and provide targeted support to those households that need it.”
Whether the federal court rules, as BAMP and others (including the Allegheny Institute believe), that Pittsburgh’s “inclusionary zoning” mandate to promote “affordable housing” is illegal, remains to be seen.
But what remains crystal clear is that it is a deleterious public policy that, as is the case with so many “progressive” policies, leads to the exact opposite outcome that its aficionados tout.
Public policy that disserves the public weal is quite the oxymoron.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitue.org).
