1 week Ago
Over several decades I have worked with several dozen communities on growth and change issues. When the cost of housing, the lack of housing or both problems have become local issues, it is inevitable that suggestions (or accusations) are made that zoning is the cause of and the solution to housing problems. Communities that hesitate for whatever reasons to change their zoning to allow more housing units per acre are cast as being selfish, elitist or ignorant of what is supposed to be.
When there are not enough residential properties to meet demand and communities don’t change their zoning to accommodate higher densities of residential development, I have seen several efforts to get state legislatures or the courts to force zoning changes upon a town or an entire state. Peter Ryner has been a research faculty member at the University of Michigan while serving as planning director of the University of Southern Maine’s Coastal Zone Laboratory. He has also served as a consultant to the federal government on coastal zone and ocean management issues.
He lives in Windham. Across the country, there have been hundreds of court cases and hotly debated legislative sessions dealing with this topic. It would be nice if Maine could avoid some of the wasted time, anger, fear and political energy spent on such debates by remembering why zoning exists and what it can and cannot accomplish.
*** Having read hundreds of zoning ordinances, having participated in dozens of zoning lawsuits and worked with approximately 50 communities on writing or revising all or portions of their local zoning ordinance, I have yet to meet a zoning ordinance that couldn’t be made easier to understand, enforce, defend in court or be modified to more effectively achieve what a community really desires. However, I also have yet to find a community where more housing and/or more affordable housing can be created just by changing the zoning, even though that has been tried many times. Until very recently, most of the housing in Maine has been rural in nature, with single-family homes on single-family lots.
In this pattern of development, homes provide their own water, obtained from on-site springs or wells. Also on that same parcel of land, all of the liquid waste from toilets, washing machines, dishwashers, bathtubs and showers is disposed of. Over time, cesspools have given way to increasingly sophisticated and costly septic systems, designed to prevent pollution of ground and surface water.
For this form of residential development to work, each lot has to be large enough to keep seepage from contaminating the adjacent well, while also not contaminating their neighbor’s well. One of my first jobs for the town of Hyannis on Cape Cod was to find a way to help about 20 low-income small-lot home owners whose septic systems had contaminated each other’s wells. The costly solution was to extend town sewer and town water to each of those homes.
It turned out that the town’s sewer treatment plant was threatening the town’s own water supply, but that’s another story. If a residential lot is next to a stream, river, pond or lake, there is an additional constraint as to how much residential development can, or should, take place. While acting as planning director for the University of Michigan Sea Grant Program, one of our teams conducted extensive on-site tests of shoreland development and found that nitrate nitrogen from septic systems can travel up to 400 feet underground.
This suggests that, to avoid long-term contamination or excessive aquatic plant growth, when a public sewer line is not available, shoreland residential lots need to be large enough to keep septic systems up to 400 feet away from surface waters and from adjacent drinking wells. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in much of the Lakes region. What were once summer camps on 1⁄4- or 1⁄2-acre lots are converted to much larger year-round homes, generating more runoff, more groundwater contamination, and creating a near-future crisis as once desirable swimming and fishing waters become unpleasant mats of thick streaming weeds and algae.
If they remain unchecked, they may also become dangerous for human contact and threaten the perceived value of shoreland properties and town tax bases. And before changing zoning to allow more housing, whether or not it is located near the water, it is also essential to know where and how the septage sludge generated by individual septic systems and community treatment facilities will be disposed of. Putting it on farmers’ fields as a soil amendment hasn’t worked out too well.
*** Each residential unit, whether a single-family home, a townhouse or apartment, generates traffic. Although Portland’s zoning ordinance thinks otherwise, most residents need a place to park a vehicle, preferably out of the weather and, these days, a place where a vehicle can be secured against collision or theft. And each new residential unit means more Uber drivers, delivery and service vehicle trips to and from residential units that add more and different amounts of traffic.
And more school buses. Each added residential unit needs more electricity, which in the past just magically appeared. Soon, adequate electrical supply may become a serious constraint in some communities for higher densities of growth.
Not to mention internet service. Each dwelling unit generates solid waste, which has to go somewhere. Each dwelling unit requires sources of food, jobs, recreational facilities, graveyards, police and fire services.
And if additional density of residential development is to be allowed, there is a greater need for trees. Trees to keep new development from becoming so hot in July and August that it becomes a health threat. Trees to capture dust and buffer noise from adjacent roads.
Trees are needed to absorb growing amounts of stormwater caused by the paving of more and more surfaces. Trees to keep communities part of Maine, rather than just anywhere. In several Maine communities, new higher-density residential housing is beginning to look more like my old Marine Corps barracks, warehousing people rather than creating places that allow healthy, safe, sustainable community living.
A housing unit is like a tree. Beneath the surface of a town’s zoning ordinance is a vast, often complex root system controlled by an often confusing, sometimes conflicting set of rules and regulations, tied to capital improvement budgets and long-term master plans that try to make sure that all the pieces fit together. It needs to make sure that there is somehow enough money to meet the constantly increasing costs of operation and, ultimately, as required by law, ensure that the residents of the town are safe and protected from health threats.
It also needs to make sure they have adequate school, medical, fire, police and recreational services that do not violate the rights of individual property owners without good and provable public cause. Just stacking units together so that more bodies can be stuffed in does not make or sustain a community or promote social justice. Asserting or just assuming that “somebody else” will take care of parking spaces or water supply or waste disposal or sufficient teaching staff or prevent flooding from increased stormwater runoff can perhaps reduce the initial cost of constructing a housing unit, but that will not solve our housing problems.
Zoning can be and has been a powerful tool to address housing and other community problems. But it is most often the final step, implementing a well-thought-out strategy that has addressed a large number of “where, when, how and why” questions that need to be answered — before the zoning is changed — if we want sustainable, livable communities. To increase the number of housing units available in Maine, in a way that can be sustained by the communities in which they are constructed, requires hard work, taking time, having real information and fostering cooperative town-wide and regional input.
Also essential to solving our housing problems is that individual communities and entire regions take steps to ensure that at least some new housing units are not only affordable when first constructed, but stay affordable through cycle after cycle of sales. Many Maine communities have or are in the process of creating effective solutions to address housing needs. If communities are given time, guidance, technical assistance and financial encouragement, working in cooperation with institutions and businesses within their communities, new answers can be invented.
Zoning, by itself, is neither the source nor the solution to Maine’s housing problems. We believe it’s important to offer commenting on certain stories as a benefit to our readers. At its best, our comments sections can be a productive platform for readers to engage with our journalism, offer thoughts on coverage and issues, and drive conversation in a respectful, solutions-based way.
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