#minimum-lot-size

#minimum-lot-size

Good urbanism should transcend politics. Socialists and capitalists can walk the same neighborhood and agree it's a pleasant place to live. They can each appreciate the tree canopy, the corner café with people spilling onto the sidewalk, the mix of ages on bikes and on foot, the architectural details of older buildings, and so on.

One of the solutions to the housing crisis can be found in our backyards, our attics, or our basements - in an Ancillary Dwelling Unit. By making it easier for New Yorkers to turn their homes into an extra place for a loved one or a little more income, we're allowing our city to grow while keeping the character of the neighborhoods we love.

Through Community Facilities Districts (CFD), Municipal Utility Districts (MUD), Public Improvement Districts (PID), Community Development Districts (CDD) and reimbursement districts (RD), builders can potentially shift infrastructure costs off their balance sheets and onto special districts that homebuyers ultimately absorb through property taxes without potentially adding debt to the builder's books.

We're also now getting to this point where, despite all of those changes, we're still the slowest city to build. We have to now take a stab at the harder problems, including Charter reform, to enable us to be able to make those changes.

The cost rose a lot following the pandemic. And some of that was supply chain issues that really increased the costs, and then they didn't quite come back down. And now tariffs are also impacting some products. These costs are part of the reason the amount of new rental housing stock is shrinking.

America's quilt work of states whose governors and lawmakers are bucking for housing policy change to break through supply constraints at the root of the nation's affordability crisis now counts Massachusetts among them. With a focus on prohibitively constrictive building codes and zoning ordinances, Gov. Maura Healey has adopted an approach officials in other states and cities have taken before pulling the legislative trigger study the matter for a year or more before drafting a reform policy agenda.

Rajinder Singh Pander, of Windsor, Berkshire, had been served an enforcement notice by Hounslow Council requiring him to demolish the unsafe building - but he ignored the order and continued to rent out the property on Worthing Road, Heston, west London. A young family, including a child, lived there for two years in "cramped and substandard living conditions, giving rise to serious concerns about their health and wellbeing", according to Hounslow Council.

With just five months before landmark housing legislation takes effect throughout California, San Jose officials are racing to exempt broad swaths of the city from the law. Sen. Scott Wiener's Senate Bill 79, signed into law in October, aims to encourage denser housing construction around transit hubs. In San Jose, the law would cover 40,000 parcels of land, in many cases pushing up the maximum height and density limits for newly constructed residential buildings, according to city officials.

San Francisco-based YIMBY Law sent a letter to the city yesterday saying that Senate Bill 330 would protect the project from the ballot initiative moving forward and comply with the Housing Element, a state-required housing plan. SB330, the Housing Crisis Act of 2019, was a law designed to speed up housing construction by limiting local governments' ability to block or slow down housing projects, prohibiting "downzoning," establishing development timelines, and imposing stricter objective standards for approvals

Utah lawmakers opened their 2026 legislative agenda with a proposal to revive a once-bedrock fixture of the American Dream of homeownership: starter homes. By streamlining permit approvals and rezoning for smaller property lots, Beehive State legislators will try to pry open a path to first-time homeownership. The bill would reduce minimum lot sizes to encourage the construction of starter homes and improve problematic statewide housing affordability.

Cedar Street just came out victorious in a multi-year saga with the city of La Canada Flintridge, winning the first successful builder's remedy case in California Superior Court for its 80-unit mixed-use project at 600 Foothill Boulevard and setting a path for other developers to build. But the fight may have left its scars, in time, stress and now soured relationships with some officials.