Why is there so much opposition to Single Family Homes?

In Defense of Houses

Single-family homes are the backbone of American aspiration—so why do so many people oppose them?

Joel KotkinWendell CoxJuly 16, 2019
Economy, finance, and budgets
California


A critical component in the rise of market-oriented democracy in the modern era has been the dispersion of property ownership among middle-income households—not just in the United States but also in countries like Holland, Canada, and Australia, where it was closely linked with greater civil and economic freedom. In its early days, this dispersion was largely rural, but after the Second World War, it took on a largely suburban emphasis in the U.S., including within the extended metro regions of traditional cities like New York and Los Angeles. American homeownership soared between 1940 and 1962, from 44 percent to 63 percent.

Today, the aspiration of regular people to own homes—arguably one of the greatest achievements of postwar democracy—is fading. But the dilution of this key aspect of the American dream is not the result of market conditions or changing preferences, but rather the concerted effort of planners and pundits. California offers the most striking example. Housing affordability was once a hallmark of life in the Golden State, but over the past three decades, and particularly since the imposition of draconian climate policies, stringent land-use regulations have driven up land prices so much that middle-income, single-family housing is now virtually impossible to build, helping make prices of existing homes prohibitive. Median house prices in the state’s coastal metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and San Jose) have risen to nearly 250 percent above the national average, according to the 2017 American Community Survey. Median gross rents, which tend to follow house prices, are more than 75 percent higher than the national average. According to the National Association of Realtors, it takes a household income of $273,000—almost five times the national average—to qualify for the median-priced house in the San Jose metropolitan area. In San Francisco, an income of $208,000 is needed. In San Diego, it’s $138,000, and in Los Angeles, $122,000—both more than double the national average.

Many younger people, wanting to live and work in the wealthy metros, have little choice but to become permanent renters, usually in smaller apartments. In California’s San Jose metropolitan area (Silicon Valley), homeownership among post-college millennials (aged 25 to 34) dropped by 40 percent in 25 years, compared with a less than 20 percent national drop during that same period. Few are saving sufficiently to make homeownership a reality. Millennials with college debt would need up to 27 years to accumulate enough for a down payment in the San Francisco metro area, according to one study.

Without owning a home, however, younger people face major obstacles to boosting their net worth, because property remains crucial to long-term financial security. Homes today account for roughly two-thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans, and homeowners have a median net worth more than 85 times that of renters, according to the Census Bureau. Lower homeownership rates are a major reason why (according to2014 Census numbers) black households had a median net worth of just $10,000 and Hispanic households just $18,000. By contrast, white, non-Hispanic households had a median net worth of $130,000. Asians were even more affluent, at $157,000.

Seeking to address the crisis of affordability in prosperous metro areas, California’s recently shelved SB50, sponsored by state senator Scott Wiener, would have overridden local zoning by allowing fourplexes (four-unit apartment buildings) to be built in areas zoned for single-family dwellings. But SB50, operating on the assumption that increasing the supply of units would be enough to bring housing costs within reason, didn’t address other state and local regulations and fees that constrain housing supply, including measures that have blocked expansion of lower-density housing construction on the urban fringe. Urbanist Alain Bertaud has described how such regulations can worsen housing shortages, raising costs in both urban and suburban areas and harming the poor especially. As we’ve noted elsewhere, prior to the adoption of such measures, California’s housing prices weren’t that much higher than the national average, during a period when the state’s population was expanding rapidly.

Some of the support for such measures is openly hostile to single-family housing. Social-justice advocates, for their part, maintain that, since single-family neighborhoods have been historically white, their perpetuation is thus racist, as Seattle’s leftist weekly The Stranger contends. But we’re not living in Jim Crow times. Even in deep-South Atlanta, more than 70 percent of blacks and Hispanics live in the outer suburbs, where single-family housing predominates.In the 53 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, more than two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics now live in lower-density outer metropolitan areas. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine policies more disadvantageous to blacks and Hispanics than California-style land-use regulations, which have pushed up median house prices well beyond their grasp. Another source of opposition to single-family housing comes from today’s density activists, who claim that living close together fosters greater community spirit and positive social results. Yet surveys continue to find suburbanites more satisfied with their living conditions than those in the urban core or rural areas.

The most persistent opponents of middle-class, single-family housing, though, are the Greens. The environmental magazine Grist envisions millennials as a “hero generation” that will escape the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents, despite surveys and migration data demonstrating the opposite. That most families still prefer such housing is problematic, since, as one Grist editor put it, “a lot of green good comes from bringing fewer beings onto a polluted and crowded planet”—in other words, single-family homes encourage people to have more kids. Indeed, there is an association between suburbia and fertility: Census Bureau data show that people living in high-density neighborhoods have fewer offspring and are less likely to be married.

In fact, suburban houses, according to data in one Australian study (conducted by coauthor Cox’s consultancy), use less energy than do the dwellings of inner-city urbanites. As British scholar Hugh Byrd has noted, suburban roofs would be ideal places to site photovoltaic solar technology. In the future, he suggests, if this usage becomes commonplace, “suburbia will have a renewed role as both a collector and supplier of energy, a characteristic that cannot be achieved in the higher density CBD [Central Business District].”

Such opposition to single-family housing is occurring even as millennials, many entering their thirties, are demonstrating a preference for lower-density living. Since 2010, 80 percent of millennial population growth has been in the suburbs. Some of this is simply demographics: most people with young children, or contemplating the prospect of having children, prefer single-family houses. Nearly three-quarters of millennials want single-family detached houses, according to a 2019 report on homebuyer preferences by the National Association of Homebuilders. A 2018 Apartment List survey found that 80 percent of millennials aspire to homeownership.

These preferences can be seen in the marketplace. In America, among those under 35 who buy homes, four-fifths choose single-family detached houses. Since 2010, a net 1.8 million people have moved away from the urban-core counties of major metropolitan areas, largely to lower-density counties, where single-family houses predominate.

A strong land-owning middle order has been essential in democracies going back to ancient Athens and the Roman and Dutch republics, to say nothing of the United States. It was essential to the thinking of the Founding Fathers and writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville. Today, often through deliberate policy, we are undermining this critical property-owning middle class—and impeding not only the economic future and family prospects of a young generation but also the wellsprings of liberal democracy. If the trend persists, America will become increasingly feudal in its economic and social form.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. Wendell Cox is the principal of Demographia, a public-policy consultancy, and a senior fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.

Marin must integrate or face lawsuits!

Supervisor Judy Arnold reports on the Fair Housing Conference in Marin in April 2016.  She recounts the policy objective of HUD to "eliminate racism" by forcing racial quotas throughout Marin.

It will be interesting to see how Marin County will address this.  For now, Marin County has indicated that it wants to place 80% of affordable housing in Marinwood Lucas Valley.

Does this seem right?   Just build a bunch of big box apartment complexes and fill them up with minorities to "balance" our entire county?   Is this just another form of apartheid?

Social engineers always think that the "next plan" is going to fix their "old plan".   I have a suggestion:  "Why not respect EVERY COMMUNITY.  We are not "colors".  We are people.  Every neighborhood deserves respect."

April 20, 2016 County Connection
By Judy Arnold
Novato Advance
Volume 93, Issue 16

Fair Housing

I recently participated in an all-day conference about barriers to fair housing choice sponsored by Fair Housing of Marin.

Understanding what fair housing means is not all that easy. It is important to note that fair housing does not mean affordable housing. Lack of affordable housing may be identified as one barrier to fair housing, but many other issues may result in unfair access to housing. Fair housing is about giving people protected under the Civic Rights Law the opportunity to fulfill their choice of where they want to live. The protected class includes those categories listed in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, and in other housing-related transactions, based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status (including children under the age of 18 living with parents or legal custodians, pregnant women, and people securing custody of children under the age of 18), and disability.

The conference kicked off by addressing “How Government Policies have Shaped Segregated Housing patterns in the Nation and the Bay Area” - taking a look back at how the federal government played a major role in perpetuating the segregation of African Americans (and other minorities) with housing policies in the 1930’s and the current challenge of reversing that pattern.

Sara Pratt, formerly of HUD and now counsel to a D.C. law firm, provided us with a broader understanding on the impact of segregation on communities and how HUD will be looking for patterns of integration and segregation, concentrated areas of poverty, disparate access to opportunity, and other community actions that prevent protected members of our communities from having a choice of where they can live.

Why is this information important? It is important because while fair housing laws have been on the books since 1968, some have argued their enforcement could have been better, and last year HUD released new rules regarding fair housing intended to do just that. These rules require local jurisdictions to identify areas of minority concentration (for Marin that could be the Canal, Marin City and areas in southern Novato), determine if local policies and practices encourage those patterns, and then prove to HUD that you are doing something to proactively undo those patterns.

Why should we care about this? First and foremost, tackling issues of racism and discrimination should be a priority for all of us, because it is the right thing to do. In addition to that, it is the law. Take a look at Westchester County in New York – they were found to have areas of minority concentration, were sued for failing to advance fair housing in their communities, and ultimately settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay $30 million to HUD, as well as supply an additional $30 million for construction of 750 units of fair and affordable housing over a seven years period in areas of the County with low African American and Hispanic populations. Similar stories are found in Yonkers, New Orleans and most recently Baltimore County who, faced with a lawsuit, signed an agreement with HUD to commit at least $3 million in County funds annually for ten years to create no fewer than 1,000 affordable housing units.

HUD has made it clear to Marin County that we need to provide them with data on existing areas of minority concentration and what we will be doing as a community to address that trend. If we do not make meaningful movements towards this directive not only will we lose our Community Development Block Grant Funding from HUD that we currently use for housing like OMA Village in Novato or the Gates Cooperative in Sausalito, but we will surely be sued by a fair housing advocacy group which could result in a multi-million settlement that would mean cutting important services from our General Fund.

Stay tuned for more on this later this year, as the County will be partaking in an inclusive public process as we prepare our required report to HUD. The issue of fair housing is not a partisan one nor should it be a divisive issue for our cities and county. I look forward to a robust public discussion with our residents, city and town councils, and the county as we move forward to fulfill this mandate.

As always, my door is open to you and I welcome your suggestions and ideas. You can reach me at: (415) 473-7331 or jarnold@marincounty.org.

9 words that shook Seattle: Are our zoning roots really racial?

9 words that shook Seattle: Are our zoning roots really racial?

by Eric Scigliano79 Comments


Homes on Queen Anne (2002) Credit: Carl Alexander/Flickr

UPDATE, 6/20/15, 12:32 p.m.: Following publication of this article, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project posted a response to the HALA report’s citation of the project, noting that “essentializing all single family zoning as inherently racist is unhelpful for understanding the role of racism in housing markets, past or present.” More on this statement following the article.

Sometimes a few words take on a life of their own, at once transcending and summing up the document that contains them, at least in the public’s mind. The Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) presented last week by a city select committee, and promptly endorsed by Mayor Ed Murray, contains one such zinger: “Seattle’s zoning has roots in racial and class exclusion and remains among the largest obstacles to realizing the City’s goals for equity and affordability.”

That claim quickly flew around the local media and blogosphere. Seattle Globalist quoted it as authoritative. Seattle Times columnist Jon Talton cited it and a few more lines as “a useful jumping-off point” for discussion, and the Times’ Danny Westneat repeated it without comment. It got further play in a Times news story, SeattlePI.com, the Seattle Bubble real estate blog, the national Next City blog, development lobbyist Roger Valdez’s blog, and Publicola, which then rephrased it more baldly and pointedly inanother piece: “The city’s traditional SFZs [single-family zones] had a racist and exclusionary past.”


This was the sort of carry-though a publicist would kill for. None of these outlets questioned the premise or conclusion. Crosscut’s David Kroman did note thecombustible nature of the language, and Knute Berger (also of Crosscut) told SeattleMagazine.com readers the statement was “incomplete and inflammatory” — until the HALA editors fixed it by removing the words “single family” before “zoning” in an earlier draft. The point, he explained, was that “while racial and class inequality have been major factors in shaping the city, it is not a problem in single-family neighborhoods alone.”

That’s not the point. There are a few other problems with that resonant HALA statement, even post-edit. First, it’s still inflammatory, and may still serve as a preemptive silencer for anyone who questions any of the HALA report’s premises or conclusions: Do you want to be called “racist” as well as “NIMBY” and “entitled”? Second, it’s unsupported by the only evidence it cites. And third, judging by the historical evidence and the explanations I’ve received from the report’s authors, it’s not true — just truthy in a Colbert Report kinda way.

The HALA report conflates two trends that were concurrent but distinct in Seattle: public zoning – laws dictating what could be built where – and racially restrictive covenants. These were private conditions, typically written by developers or real estate agents and attached to property deeds, that dictated who could and couldn’t live where. Starting around 1924 and peaking around 1928, no fewer than 414 neighborhoods in and around Seattle instituted covenants excluding what were then called the “Ethiopian and Malay races,” and occasionally “Hebrew persons.” A subdivision in what’s now Clyde Hill allowed only “persons of the Aryan race.” These private covenants extended not just where you’d expect – Broadmoor and Windermere and tracts across the North End, West Seattle, and suburbs – but parts of Capitol Hill and Beacon Hill, Hillman City in the Rainier Valley, and Squire Park on the west side of the Central District.

A footnote to HALA’s “racial and class exclusion” phrase directs readers to a “discussion of racial restrictive covenants in Seattle.” This is a page on theSegregated Seattle site of the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, edited by UW historian James Gregory, a respected authority in the field. Gregory didn’t respond to email or phone messages, and reportedly has declined to discuss the HALA report on the record. But I did speak with Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, a professor in UW’s College of the Built Environment and scholar of Seattle’s urban-design history, and he affirmed my reading: “The footnote refers to something that does not say what the report says. You will not find on that website any place that says Seattle’s zoning is racially based.”


The Segregated Seattle report, written by a student, mentions zoning just once, in this somewhat garbled and tendentious passage: “The use of racial restrictive covenants removed the need for zoning ordinances. In that way, they served to segregate cities without any blame being placed on municipal leaders.”

Perhaps the HALA writers read that quickly and were misled. It actually references an account of residential segregation in St. Louis and its suburbs, Colin Gordon’s Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Decline of the American City.That book tells a story very different from Seattle’s.

St. Louis had tried to institute de jure residential racial segregation, as did many Southern cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But in 1916 the U.S. Supreme Court declared such laws contrary to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. That spurred an explosion of private covenants in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, until the court finally found them unconstitutional as well.

Covenants didn’t make zoning obsolete. The Progressive Movement promoted zoning as a way to make cities safer, cleaner and healthier, and, yes, more democratic. Cities embraced it as a way to boost growth, property values and taxes. The U.S. Commerce Department put out model zoning ordinances.

Seattle didn’t enact racial zoning pre-1916. That didn’t necessarily reflect enlightened principles; its black population before the interwar Great Migration was too small to draw such attention. The city adopted its first, nonracial zoning code in 1923. The private covenants came afterward.

So where are the “roots in racial and class exclusion”? I called attorney Faith Li Pettis, the HALA committee’s co-chair. “That passage has been getting a lot of attention,” she said. “I want to be very clear about this – we are not calling single-family homeowners racists.” (My African American and East African neighbors, homeowners all, will no doubt be relieved to hear this.) “We’re saying that the zoning grew out of neighborhoods that the racial covenants defined.”

How could that be when the zoning preceded the covenants? I asked. She backtracked a bit: “We are not saying that zoning grew of racial covenants. Zoning followed the patterns that were established.” Then she redirected me: “I am not the zoning expert. Alan Durning [executive director of the Sightline Institute and a member of the HALA committee] is the person to talk to about this.”

When Durning called me back, he seemed surprised at being designated the zoning expert. “I have no idea who wrote the words, but I strongly support that language,” he explained. He said he was “shocked that you would think it wasn’t about race and class, that separating single-family from multifamily [housing] wasn’t about confining lower-income to certain areas. That’s such a widely held belief – idea in urban planning.”

If so, then as Ochsner and UW historian John Findlay (who does think there’s “some truth” to the race connection) both told me, “the situation’s more complicated” in Seattle. The Central District, where African Americans were consigned by covenants and subsequent redlining, was zoned largely single-family. Just like Wallingford, Hillman City, and Upper Queen Anne (which actually tends to have smaller lots).

The class factor plays a more obvious role in zoning. When Seattle set out to eliminate its old duplex zone in the 1970s, Queen Anne’s resident lawyers, architects, and activists squawked, and duplex lots became single-family lots. Ballard, much more blue-collar then, got rolled; its duplex zones became low-rise multifamily. The results are obvious today.

But again, it’s complicated. The same multifamily zoning governed elegant, exclusive First Hill apartments and humbler flats around the city, including those scattered among older single-family neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, Durning insisted, “the whole process of dividing the city was strongly colored by the existing racial divisions, covenants, redlining, zoning – that was all intermingled together.” When I again pressed the question of what came from what, he said, more broadly, that “it was soil that the plant grew out of – our zoning grew out of a climate of race and class exclusion.”

Well, yeah, but you might say that about just about anything in the early and mid-20th century. You could certainly say it about mass transit, which started as private streetcar lines that enabled commuters to escape the crowding, noise, and those people back in the city for Phinney Ridge, Laurelhurst and other new single-family developments.

But does all this matter? Durning didn’t seem to think so: “We’ve spent considerably more time discussing this sentence than it took to write it.”

“Some people will say it’s a distinction that doesn’t make a difference,” says Ochsner. “I think it does. It’s a very different argument [invoking “racial and class exclusion”] than if you say public-sector zoning had no explicit racial zoning.”

A few words can have an outsized impact. Think, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…” Or “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

As Durning describes it, the wording emerged from a turbulent, messy process. “The HALA report should be read as a loose aggregation of intentions and mostly shared beliefs by 28 people who spent months disagreeing about a great many things.”

Cindi Barker, Delridge’s representative on the citywide Neighborhood Council, calls herself “the token neighborhood person” on the HALA committee. She says that the misleading footnote was “a placeholder” in earlier drafts. Then she noticed it was still in the final and followed the link. “I said, ‘Guys, go read the linked document. That’s not what it says.’” But it was too late to get it changed.

Now the meme is out there. I’d like to think it reflects kneejerk reaction and sloppy haste rather than a deliberate attempt to play the race card. But it can still work to chill debate and shade the city’s response to the very real and complex challenge of housing affordability. All the more reason to examine it now – and to consider the assumptions behind HALA’s “loose aggregation of intentions.”

Seattle Mayor holds on for his political life and withdraws proposal to eliminate Single Family Home zoning.

Mayor Murray withdraws proposal to allow more density in single-family zones
Originally published July 29, 2015 at 2:57 pm Updated July 30, 2015 at 9:03 am
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray pauses during his State of the City address in February. Murray said Wednesday he’ll no longer seek to allow more types of housing in the city’s single-family zones. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)




Seattle Mayor Ed Murray made a U-turn Wednesday on a controversial aspect of his new housing-affordability plan.
SECTION SPONSOR


By Daniel Beekman
Seattle Times staff reporter


Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said Wednesday he’ll no longer seek to allow more types of housing in the city’s single-family zones, after all.

Permitting duplexes, triplexes, stacked flats and other multifamily structures in those zones was perhaps the most controversial of 65 strategies recommended earlier this month by Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Advisory (HALA) Committee.


Murray defended the proposal at a July 13 news conference where he unveiled the recommendations that together make up his new housing-affordability plan.

City Council President Tim Burgess and Councilmember Mike O’Brien, the council’s land-use committee chair, stood with the mayor at that event. But both have since come out against the proposal to change all of Seattle’s single-family zones. Zoning modifications must be approved by the council.

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Now Murray himself has made a U-turn, calling for “renewed public dialogue on how best to increase affordable housing in denser neighborhoods.”

“The Council and I created the HALA process because our city is facing a housing affordability crisis. In the weeks since the HALA recommendations were released, sensationalized reporting by a few media outlets has created a significant distraction and derailed the conversation that we need to have on affordability and equity,” he said in a statement Wednesday.

Some, though not all, of the controversy around the mayor’s proposal for single-family zones focused on him and his 28-member volunteer task force framing the changes in terms of race.

In its report to Murray, the HALA Committee wrote: “Seattle’s zoning has roots in racial and class exclusion and remains among the largest obstacles to realizing the city’s goals for equity and affordability.”

That language and similar remarks by the mayor stirred debate over the relationship between the city’s single-family zones and ongoing racial segregation.


“We also must not be afraid to talk about the painful fact that parts of our city are still impacted by the intersection of income, race and housing,” Murray said in his statement Wednesday.


“Look at a map and take a walk through our neighborhoods. We can move beyond the legacy of the old boundaries of exclusion that have remained largely unchanged since nearly a century ago when neighborhood covenants were used to keep people of color south of Madison Street.”

Murray, the HALA Committee and other proponents of more density argued that allowing more housing types in single-family zones would increase the overall housing supply, a key to making the rapidly growing city more affordable.

They noted height restrictions in those zones would remain the same.


“Fundamentally, this is a conversation about building a Seattle that welcomes people from all walks of life — where working people, low-income families, seniors, young people and the kids of current residents all can live in our city,” the mayor said Wednesday.

But some homeowners raised concerns about the changes encouraging developers to tear down bungalows and thereby alter the character of neighborhoods.


They wondered whether the new homes would actually be affordable.


Toby Thaler, a Fremont Neighborhood Council board member, called Murray’s about-face a good step.

“But the real problem is a failure to have an inclusive process that empowers all stakeholders,” Thaler said.

Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute and a HALA Committee member, said the mayor is “trying to quell the furor” in some neighborhoods.

“I’m disappointed the mayor has folded so quickly, but I’m not terribly surprised because the political blowback has been so intense,” Durning said.

“Politically, I think what the mayor is trying to do is stop the argument about one of the 65 recommendations so he and the council can get to work on the other 64.”


Faith Pettis, a Seattle lawyer whose work includes housing-financing and who co-chaired the HALA Committee, said she’s disappointed by Murray’s move.

“I believe we’ve lost an opportunity to do something that would really help this city in the long term and that people would ultimately be comfortable with,” she said, pointing out that Portland has much, much less land that is zoned single-family.

“I hope we find the political courage to deal with this in the future.”

Pettis said too much attention was paid to the panel’s recommendations for single-family zones and not enough on proposals the mayor hasn’t abandoned, such as requiring developers in multifamily zones to pay a fee or build affordable housing.

Robert Cruickshank, onetime aide to former Mayor Mike McGinn and senior campaign manager at Democracy for America, said Murray and his allies didn’t line up enough grass-roots support ahead of time.

“The way this was announced I think set it up to fail,” he said, noting the HALA Committee’s work over many months was carried out in private other than a draft report leaked to Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat.


“The claims about the history of single-family zones made a lot of people feel attacked as racist by having different feelings. People felt blindsided, and that’s not a very effective way to build public support for contentious changes.”

Cruickshank described Wednesday’s announcement as “a wake-up call.”

He said: “We have to do a lot more work. You can’t just come out with policy recommendations that you believe to be correct. You have to go out and organize to persuade people that your recommendations are right for them and our future.”

The HALA Committee recommended that officials relax restrictions on mother-in-law units and backyard cottages, which already are allowed in single-family zones.

The mayor also will no longer pursue that goal, according to a spokesman. But O’Brien still supports the idea.

“I remain committed to exploring ways we can encourage more use of mother-in-law apartments and backyard cottages,” O’Brien said, suggesting the council could take up the issue in early 2016.


“That is a reasonable way to provide more housing opportunities in some of our single-family zones.”

Murray said he intends to refocus the discussion on density and added affordability housing in Seattle’s designated Urban Centers and Urban Villages and along transit corridors.

His plan also calls for upzoning 6 percent of the city’s land that’s currently zoned single-family.