#zoning-reform

#zoning-reform

In his four years as director of the New York City Department of Planning, Dan Garodnick oversaw one of the most sweeping changes to the city's zoning rules in decades. The policy, called City of Yes, initiated a collection of revisions to boost housing, including updates that allow new apartment projects to add bulk used for affordable housing, homes to convert basements or add backyard cottages as accessory dwellings, and more office buildings to be converted into residential space.

Rather than tinker with this, let's go big and make a real impact, Shapiro told legislators in his annual state-of-the-state address Tuesday. We need hundreds of thousands of new homes.

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.

We have clients who have looked at property in the city or town where they live, but simply can't afford what is coming onto the market. Instead, they are considering using the considerable equity they have built up with those soaring real estate valuations in recent years. Many of these people can invest money into their properties and still have equity left after a major remodel and addition.

In a year full of abundance discourse, New Rochelle Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert is living the abundance agenda. The skyline of her Westchester County city, just 20 miles north of Manhattan, is barely recognizable from a decade ago. New apartment and condo towers have shot up, the city's population is booming, and rents and home prices haven't risen nearly as fast as in other cities in the region and across the US.

"New York City, long positioned at the forefront of housing innovation, is falling behind," the author writes. "The most effective innovations happen when residents are treated as partners with authority and vision." Across the U.S. and around the world, everyday people-tenants, workers, organizers-are transforming the future of housing in their cities and catalyzing positive change. New York City, long positioned at the forefront of housing innovation, is falling behind.

Swiftbuild.ai's offering comes as President Donald Trump has urged the nation's largest homebuilders to increase new housing starts. He has also called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get big homebuilders going, claiming that builders are sitting on two million empty lots. The National Association of Home Builders and several housing economists point to zoning restrictions and permitting delays as major contributors to the national housing shortage.

Advocacy group members and union construction workers cheerfully toted signs that read "Cities are not Museums" and "Affordable Housing Can't Wait." As they see it, the city's failure to build housing at scale for the past decades has contributed to the city's affordability crisis, and the solution is to build at scale - which the zoning plan will enable.

According to the county, the proposed amendments are designed to help farmers and ranchers access undeveloped and actively farmed properties in unincorporated rural areas of Santa Clara County. These properties are being advertised for home development, which in turn has inflated land values. The proposal seeks to mitigate this by updating exclusive agriculture, agricultural ranchlands, hillside and rural residential zones.

Traditional construction methods are often labor-intensive, noisy, and wasteful. In contrast, ICON's 3D printing systems automate wall structure creation, improving efficiency and reducing waste.