Tag Archives: regulations

Going off the grid in a suburban setting

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What issues might arise if a suburbanites want to take their residence off the grid?

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Many off-gridders have glanced at their water bills and decided they’d rather use the water that falls from the sky for free, but some states make rainwater collection systems very difficult to install in your home, or have strict limits on how much rainwater can be harvested and how it can be used (for example, Colorado only allows certain properties to collect 110 gallons, which can only be used outdoors). For waste management, installing a septic system in a crowded urban neighborhood will be nearly impossible, and many states have extremely strict regulations surrounding the installation of composting toilets (not to mention extremely strict regulations about what you can do with all that waste once you’ve collected it).

Additionally, local municipalities might have laws that supersede or enhance statewide restrictions, and Home Owner Associations (HOAs) may have rules that prevent you from making the changes necessary to your home. These rules can beprettycomprehensive, too—some HOAs don’t allow clotheslines for drying clothes, for example, and can even forbid solar panels for aesthetic reasons. Condominium boards may also resist some of your off-grid choices. Bottom line: before you do anything, check the local laws and regulations that might apply to you.

Finally, while installing solar panels on your property is more or less legal in every state (and many states encourage it), not all states or local municipalities will allow you to actually disconnect from the power grid. If you feel it’s important to literally be off-grid, you’ll need to do some digging before you assume anything; and in multi-family structures like condominiums it might even be physically impossible to accomplish. Of course, the flip side to remaining connected is that in many cases you can sell excess electricity back to the grid—and if your solar rig fails at halftime during the Super Bowl, you’ll still have power…

Of course, if you’re going to grow your own food in the city, you’ll need enough space for that, too. It’s not impossible to find city homes with yards or large outdoor spaces where you might be able to grow your apocalypse garden (and even raise chickens!), but those houses will obviously be more expensive. And your property deed or local regulations might limit your ability to have “livestock” of any kind on your property (and your neighbors may or may not be excited about those chickens).

Three things strike me after reading this:

  1. Suburban life is ruled by a series of local regulations. Suburbs on the whole might have similar guidelines and expectations compared to other kinds of places but local control can lead to oddities.
  2. The ability to live in one’s own residence is connected to community regulations and a social contract with surrounding residents. This leads to two questions: can a resident go off the grid and should a resident go off the grid? What would the neighbors think?
  3. I wonder how many suburbs are prepared for this possibility. Even if regulations make it more difficult to go off the grid, what would happen in communities if someone really wanted to pursue this and they had the resources and means to pull it off?

“60 Minutes” on the 4+ million housing units needed in the United States

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This past Sunday, 60 Minutes addressed the sizable need for housing throughout the United States:

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Daryl Fairweather: We are not building enough housing for everybody who needs a place to live. We built fewer homes in the 2010s than in any decade going back to the 1960s, and at the same time millennials are the biggest generation and they’re entering into home-buying age. Millennials aren’t living in their parents’ basement any more or shacking up with roommates, they want a place of their own, and we didn’t build any housing for them in the last decade because we are still so traumatized by the last housing crisis. We didn’t put any investment into housing…

Daryl Fairweather: The government has estimated that we are short about 4 million homes in this country, and that number is likely growing, especially since the pandemic.

In my opinion, the emphasis in the rest of the segment on institutional buyers is a weird way to go given the numbers cited above. If we need over 4 million housing units, it seems like more of this falls on developers, builders, and communities to open up opportunities for new housing for millennials and others who really want it.

I wonder how much of this now works like it seems to in the auto industry. Auto makers have shifted to making trucks and SUVs because there is demand and a higher profit margin. These vehicles are not greener but there is a lot of money to be made. Is the same true of starter homes? Smaller units simply do not bring in as much money as a larger house with more amenities. And, if builders and developers have to go through a significant process to purchase land, get approval, and go through construction, wouldn’t they want more money at the end?

I think we should ask about the civic responsibility of those who can approve homes and/or build homes. Don’t we need more housing? Shouldn’t this be a shared responsibility across actors? Why are so many Americans willing to get into their particular housing unit and then shut the door to those who want a similar opportunity?

Illinois finally providing some teeth to affordable housing guidelines for communities set in 2003

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In 2003, the Illinois legislature passed guidelines saying communities with less than 10% affordable housing needed to provide a plan to address this. Only recently did lawmakers set out consequences for not following this:

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A sweeping affordable housing bill, recently passed by Illinois state lawmakers, has strengthened the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act (AHPAA). That law requires cities, with at least 1,000 residents and with less than 10% affordable housing, to submit affordable housing plans to the state. The law also allows for affordable housing developers to appeal the decisions of municipalities who reject their affordable housing proposals. Those appeals are heard by the Illinois Housing Appeals board.

The AHPAA, originally passed in 2003, is intended to encourage affordable housing, but resistance is rampant. As of October 2020, the Illinois Housing Development Authority identified 46 municipalities that met the law’s requirements. At that time, fewer than half had submitted plans or indicated that they intended to do so. Some municipalities cited home rule as the reason why they didn’t comply. The revised law says that doesn’t matter anymore. It gives the Illinois Attorney General enforcement powers, including seeking court relief, if the municipalities continue to flout the law…

Schecter said the next hurdle is getting units built — not just submitting plans. She said deadlines are needed for when municipalities must turn in their plans and by when they must achieve the 10% affordable housing requirement.

I have followed this particular Illinois statute as affordable housing, particularly in wealthier suburban areas, has been a contentious issue for decades. In some places, this has been addressed through court cases; see the example of Mount Laurel in New Jersey. Elsewhere, it is often left to market forces and municipal ordinances, which typically means that few communities explicitly address providing affordable housing (and not just housing for people groups they would like to have in their community) and local leaders and residents push back against living near cheaper housing (see the example of resistance to apartments).

The last paragraph quoted above suggests there is still work to be done. The recent changes suggests there are now consequences if communities do not submit plans. But, I would guess the real goal of the 2003 guidelines and the update is to lead to new affordable housing units. Even if tomorrow Illinois moved to push communities to submit plans, it would take years for the actual housing to be planned and built. According to various groups, there at least tens of thousands of affordable housing units needed in the Chicago region. If these legislative changes make a sizable dent in this number, this could help a lot of people.

Involving public comment in a revision of the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices

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There is a federal government manual that guides decisions for transportation engineers regarding roads. While it is notable that it is going to be revised for the first time in eleven years, there is also a process for public comment:

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The Federal Highway Administration released a draft of proposed changes late last year. The last time the manual got an update, a few thousand people, mostly transportation professionals, submitted comments. This year, 26,000 comments poured in from all over the country.

Some arrived from big companies, including the ride-hail and mobility company Lyft, the Ford-owned scooter-share company Spin, and the Alphabet company Sidewalk Labs. Each asked for a major rewrite that would, as Sidewalk Labs put it, “more closely align with the equity, safety, and sustainability goals of American cities, as well as those of the Biden administration.”

Others came from individuals. “There’s a broader set of people who see that these streets don’t work, that there are too many people getting killed, that they’re too unpleasant. It’s not consistent with what a place or a community should be,” says Mike McGinn, a former mayor of Seattle and executive director of the group America Walks. He credits those everyday activists with the new interest in the design document—and his own group, which urged thousands of people to submit comments to the federal agency…

The last time the manual got an update, the process took more than a year; with the volume of comments this year, it may take longer. A spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration says the agency “needs to carefully consider all comments before determining next steps and the timetable for updating the manual.” Given the interest, that might take a while.

One of the reasons Americans like local government is that it is easier to interact with the officials who are making the decisions. For example, in a small town to a moderately sized suburb, a resident who has feedback on a municipal decision can probably even convey this face-to-face or in a public meeting. As the size of the municipality grows, it becomes harder to meet with local officials.

At the federal level, some might feel that decisions are made by an abstract group of people in a place far away. This idea has been expressed regularly in recent years: Washington D.C. is out of touch with the rest of the country.

However, this process of public comment described above offers an opportunity for people around the United States to comment on federal guidelines for roads. In the age of the Internet and social media, this is even easier to do: people can hear about it through email or social media feeds and submit comments online.

How exactly the federal agencies in charge here work through all of these public comments would be interesting to examine. Assuming they are all read or analyzed, do they look for the most common themes? Or, are some comments weighted more than others? This sounds like an important qualitative research process in order to find the patterns in all of the comments, discuss, and then incorporate (or not) into a revised manual.

Private city for business opens in Honduras

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A Honduras city primed for business will soon open for remote operators:

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Próspera is the first project to gain approval from Honduras to start a privately governed charter city, under a national program started in 2013. It has its own constitution of sorts and a 3,500-page legal code with frameworks for political representation and the resolution of legal disputes, as well as minimum wage (higher than Honduras’s) and income taxes (lower in most cases). After nearly half a decade of development, the settlement will announce next week that it will begin considering applications from potential residents this summer.

The first colonists will be e-residents. Próspera doesn’t yet have housing ready to be occupied. But even after the site is built out, most constituents will never set foot on local soil, says Erick Brimen, its main proprietor. Instead, Brimen expects about two-thirds of Prósperans to sign up for residency in order to incorporate businesses there or take jobs with local employers while living elsewhere…

The idea behind charter cities, along with their predecessor seasteading, which sought to create independent nations floating in the ocean, is to compete for citizens through innovative, business-friendly governing systems. For some reason, the idea has long been linked to Honduras, an impoverished country whose governing system is classified as “partly free” by the human rights organization Freedom House. Paul Romer, an American economist who pioneered the idea of charter cities, tried to start one in the country a decade ago. It failed, but Honduras has spent much of the time since then writing a law to enable such cities, which are known in the country as Zedes, short for zonas de empleo y dessarollo económicos (employment and economic development zones).

But the prospect of creating pockets of prosperity that play by their own rules is controversial for obvious reasons. Próspera has drawn protests from local residents who see a lack of transparency and little to gain from its existence, and a group of local political leaders signed a letter of opposition in October. This month, an arm of the Technical University of Munich said it’s reevaluating its relationship with Próspera and that it generally withdraws from projects if there are indications of human rights violations. Representatives for TUM didn’t respond to requests to elaborate. A spokeswoman for Próspera says it has had a “great working relationship with TUM over the years.” 

Although this city has been in the works for years, it seems appropriate that is will open for remote businesses in the COVID-19 era. Even without a physical presence in the city, corporations will be able to incorporate there and enjoy the benefits.

Down the road, it is interesting to imagine what a thriving or beleagured charter city could be like. For some reason, I am thinking of some of the more colorful communities from Star Wars where all sorts of characters come together to conduct their activities. How many people would come to live and work versus how many will access the city’s benefits from afar? What kinds of alterations to the regulations might be necessary? How many free market cities might this inspire elsewhere?

What community wants to actually fine residents for not shoveling their sidewalks?

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Shoveling sidewalks in front of residences and businesses is important for pedestrians. Many communities have penalties on the books for those who do not clear their sidewalks, including Chicago:

Property owners in the city are legally required to shovel their sidewalks after it snows. And on the South Side, one alderman has been out cracking down on the problem.

Ald. Ray Lopez has been out in his 15th Ward neighborhoods since Tuesday, directing Streets and Sanitation workers to problem spots to hold people accountable.

Department workers were writing tickets to home and business owners who did not comply. Fines range up to $500…

Thirty two businesses got ticketed in the 15th Ward Tuesday, and Lopez said he expects there to be just as many Wednesday.

Even if neighbors get mad at a lack of shoveling, who wants to be the politician or local official who gives tickets to homeowners for this offense? From the information provided in the article above, it looks like the tickets were issued to businesses. It could be argued that businesses have a strong obligation to snow as it would be good for potential customers and they are often located in areas where there are more pedestrians (street corners, commercial areas along busy streets, etc.). But, imagine the optics of giving a ticket to an elderly homeowner or a single mother with multiple small children. Americans may like local government but not when that government appears to be heavy-handed.

A similar comparison might be fines many communities issue regarding long grass. If people do not keep their lawn below a certain height, some communities will come mow that lawn and then send a sizable bill. Neighbors do not like the message tall grass sends (regular lawn maintenance suggests a certain standing). I do not know the recidivism rates after this is done; it would be interesting to know if this helps promote more lawn mowing in the future.

Or, consider traffic tickets. Many drivers speed but few want to be ticketed if they are swept up in efforts to generate revenue for the community, outsiders are targeted, or routine acts are criminalized. Arguments can be made about safety and the good of the community might I would guess few people support getting a ticket.

All of this can put local officials in a tough position. These problems, unshoveled snow, long grass, and bad driving, can create dangers and resentment in a community if not addressed. But, fines may not be the best way to prompt action. Tomorrow, I will consider other options for clearing sidewalks beyond fines.

Housing as the ultimate marker of poorly functioning (free) markets

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Alexis Madrigal considers generational access to housing and the high real estate prices in some markets:

There are obviously many reasons that coastal housing markets have gone so bonkers. But it is an ironic twist that residential property, which once served as the bedrock for American capitalism, has become the most obvious sign for young people that something is deeply wrong with the markets.

What exactly has gone “deeply wrong” with these housing markets? Madrigal lays out a number of factors. But, I wonder if we could extend the analysis a bit further from “housing markets” to “economic markets” more broadly. Here is what two opposing sides might say:

One side: these housing markets with high prices have never truly been free. For decades, federal policy has privileged single-family homes. Local policies have made particular choices, often toward protecting property values and limiting density. Open up these markets to true competition. If affordable housing is needed, limit regulations and let all the money of potential buyers drive new development.

The other side: housing markets have not been regulated enough. The federal and local policies have tended to privilege certain actors – like the white middle-class and connected developers – over the needs of many working-class and poor residents as well as non-white residents. Policies aimed at providing more housing for all need more teeth and the ability to compel protected wealthier residents to accept development near their own homes.

As a sociologist who has studied this for over a decade, I tend to side with the latter argument: (1) markets are rarely ever completely and free and (2) the scales have been tipped toward whiter and wealthier residents for a long time. Perhaps the true lesson of these high-priced housing markets is that calls for regulation and oversight only go so far when property values and who neighbors are is truly at stake.

Ordinances and zoning against dollar stores

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With evidence that dollar stores provide poor quality food options and limited jobs, some communities have used certain tools to restrict their presence:

While some local governments continue to lure dollar stores to town with tax subsidies and incentives, others are doing the opposite. A dollar store NIMBY movement has been gaining traction.

In Chester, Vermont, for example, residents argued in 2012 that allowing dollar stores to come to town “will be the beginning of the end for what might best be described as Chester’s Vermontiness,” per the New York Times—a statement that itself perhaps signals the class and race associations dollar stores have come to embody. In Buhler, Kansas, the mayor saw what happened to surrounding grocery stores in neighboring Haven and rejected the dollar store chain, also citing a threat to the town’s character.

“It was about retaining the soul of the community,” he told The Guardian. “It was about, what kind of town do we want?”

More recent efforts have used zoning tweaks to limit dollar stores, whose small footprint usually lets them breeze past restrictions big-box stores cannot. In Mendocino County, California, dollar store foes passed legislation restricting chain store development writ large. And in April, the Tulsa City Council passed an ordinance that requires dollars stores to be built at least one mile away from each other in North Tulsa. It also tacks on incentives for healthy grocers and supermarkets providing healthy food to locate in that area. “I don’t think it’s an accident they proliferate in low socio-economic and African American communities,” Vanessa Hall-Harper, a city councillor who grew up in North Tulsa and shepherded the ordinance, told ILSR. Since then, Mesquite, Texas, has followed suit with a similar move.

Communities have fairly broad powers to encourage or limit the presence of certain kinds of development. If they do not desire the building or the opening of a dollar store, then they can limit or eliminate the possibilities for a dollar store in that community.

Of course, the dollar stores can respond with their own tactics. Here are a few I could imagine (drawing from similar cases involving other businesses):

  1. Building just outside the jurisdiction of the municipality.
  2. Working with a neighboring community who is willing to have them.
  3. Mounting a public campaign against the community to tout the advantages of their business.

While the third option might be more of a nuclear option, the first two mean that another municipality could benefit from sales tax and property tax revenues, the limited number of jobs, and easier access for nearby residents.

Limiting suburban redtape to installing solar panels

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A program is helping a number of Chicago area communities make it easier for residents to add solar panels:

If you want to install solar panels for your house or business, you’re likely to find a faster and more user-friendly permitting process if your community has earned a SolSmart designation.

Illinois has 18 SolSmart communities, including Aurora, Hanover Park, South Barrington, and Cook and Kane counties. Another 22 — including Elgin, Lake in the Hills, Naperville and DuPage County — started the designation procedure last month.

The designation means towns and counties have streamlined processes and reviewed ordinances to clearly spell out requirements, and staff members have been trained to properly examine installation plans and inspect the finished work…

There are 223 SolSmart communities across the country. The program launched in April 2016 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to the International City/County Management Association and The Solar Foundation, which provides technical assistance.

Residents of the American suburbs like their local government and local control yet this is an example where local bodies can get in the way: does every suburb have to go through separate processes to address solar panels? It sounds like the SolMart program helps provide resources and guidance so that suburbs do not have to do all the work on their own.

Thinking more broadly, what other suburban initiatives could be addressed at a similar level? I’m guessing a national campaign to have more permeable driveways might not work as well or one that installs containers to catch rainwater from gutters. I wonder if the solar panels issue works in part because the demand for them is still relatively small in the Chicago suburbs. Or, perhaps it is because it deals with roofs – a part of buildings that is not as visible – so concern is minimized.

Defining a McMansion, Trait #2: Relative size

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When I tell people that I have published about McMansions, the same question almost always arises: “What exactly is a McMansion?” My paper defining the McMansion answers this but in a series of posts here, I want to update the definition based on what I have seen in the last five years.

While McMansions are certainly larger than normal, in certain circumstances they can appear even larger than their square footage: when constructed next to smaller homes (often teardowns, sometimes infill properties) or when squeezed onto small lots (so that the homes seem to be bursting off the property). While I know the second case does happen quite a bit, most of the McMansion coverage of this trait in recent years focuses on teardown properties. Some patterns I’ve observed:

  1. The typical case involves someone from outside the neighborhood purchasing an older home (often a postwar house), demolishing it, and constructing a significantly larger home and/or a home that has a different architectural style than nearby homes. This one picture is a great illustration. Note that the new home does not necessarily have to be over 3,000 square feet or even include the worst McMansion architecture; it just has to be different from the existing homes.
  2. Media coverage of teardown McMansions is overwhelmingly negative. This is likely the issue only comes up neighbors upset over the construction of a teardown McMansion start looking for ways to stop the construction or limit future construction. On the flip side, it is hard to know how many teardown McMansions are constructed without much furor.
  3. It is hard to know exactly what motivates neighbors to complain so vociferously about teardown McMansions. Americans seem to want the ability to buy new homes in good neighborhoods (balancing modern features with valuable locations) but don’t like what it happens to them. The complaints often fall into two camps. First, those who live directly adjacent to a teardown may have a range of new issues to confront: people able to see in their windows, a hulking property next door, losing sunlight, the older home now looking dated or different. Second, the larger issue is often couched in terms of the character of the neighborhood. People feel that when they move to a particular place, that street or neighborhood should stay similar – after all, they liked its features enough that they moved there. A teardown McMansion threatens that.
  4. The fights between neighbors can be quite contentious, a rarity in many suburban communities where middle-class decorum suggests conflict avoidance is best. Lawuits occur (example and example), and some neighbors may even pool their resources to buy a nearby home and save it from being torn down. But, if the foundation of American life is owning a home, perhaps it is not surprising that such conflict arises when owners perceive their home to be under threat. See my six steps for responding to a nearby teardown McMansion.
  5. These conflicts often involve local officials. Numerous communities across the United States have guidelines for teardowns (see the example of Austin several years ago and Los Angeles more recently). Outside of historic preservation districts, these guidelines typically limit the size of the new home (through guidelines like a Floor Area Ratio) and/or provide guidance on particular architectural features.
  6. The teardown debates tend to put local officials in a strange position. Whose rights should they defend? Property owners? If so, do they want to allow long-time residents to have a voice in shaping their own neighborhoods or do they want individual owners to be able to sell their property at a good profit? Can they openly support builders and developers? I suspect most communities want to – growth, particularly high-end houses, is an important marker of vitality – but you don’t want to always run roughshod over your constituents. Teardowns are most common in neighborhoods and communities that are already well off – see recent evidence from the Chicago region – and this tends to pit already well-off community members versus well-off outsiders.

Teardown McMansions are a subset of McMansions as a whole, often constructed in desirable neighborhoods and sometimes raising the ire of neighbors and concerned citizens. Balancing the rights of neighbors and property owners will likely continue to be a sticky issue for many local governments.