Inclusionary Housing: The Controversy Continues

Inclusionary housing is aimed at creating better communities by producing affordable housing and encouraging social inclusion. As used here, 'inclusion' encompasses racial and ethnic integration and income-mixing with the latter typically employed to achieve integration. Despite its laudable goals, inclusionary housing continues to spark controversy and litigation in many places. What then is the future of inclusionary housing, and, who cares? These questions are important to planners and public officials concerned with housing affordability, social inequalities, land use inefficiencies and environmental quality. Despite inclusionary housing's potential to address an array of community issues, its history, the housing crash and subsequent global economic recession threaten the survival of this planning policy. An innovative idea faces challenges Inclusionary housing is a term applied to a wide range of practices. It is used generally for policies and programmes aimed at mixing incomes within housing developments and communities and more specifically as a planning practice that emerged in the 1970s in the US. While I briefly discuss programmes supporting mixed-income housing in a later section, for the most part I focus on inclusionary housing as a US planning practice that diffused widely despite it being an anathema to many private developers. The emergence of inclusionary housing in the US was an incremental process with complex social catalysts fuelling its creation.1 The general idea was straightforward: use the land use regulations in communities to provide for more rental and/or ownership housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income households. Given the method used to accomplish this goal, the practice is also commonly referred to as inclusionary zoning. Montgomery County, Maryland, was one of the first communities credited with adopting inclusionary zoning in the US.2 In the 1970s, Montgomery County took the bold step of requiring developments of 50 or more housing units to ensure that 15% of the units be affordable to moderate-income households. To address claims that this type of mandatory inclusionary zoning constituted a 'taking' without just compensation (economic loss of private property due to government action), Montgomery County provided a density bonus (additional units than would normally be allowed under the zoning code) to affected developers. Despite this cost offset provided to developers, opposition to Montgomery County's inclusionary zoning was not trivial. Opponents raised several legal questions, as well as expressed concerns about reduced profits for developers and the effect of inclusionary policy on existing plans. These challenges may have slowed down the implementation of the County's inclusionary zoning, but they did not derail it. Soon after, inclusionary zoning began to spread to other jurisdictions, but not without controversy and legal challenges.3 States also created laws to encourage inclusionary housing. Massachusetts was an early adopter of such a law (Chapter 40B), commonly known as 'anti-snob' zoning, which promotes the development of affordable housing. Massachusetts's policy, however, did not quickly spread to other states. In New Jersey some observers thought the decisions in the Mount Laurel cases heard in the State Supreme Court in 1975 and 19834 would quell opposition to inclusionary housing and be the exemplar for supportive and widespread state-wide policies, but that did not happen. The state of California adopted a weak inclusionary programme known as the density bonus law. State representatives declare emphatically that this is not state-wide inclusionary zoning, but rather a voluntary method to increase affordable housing in communities. Research suggests it has not been particularly successful (McLaughlin, 2009). California's efforts at inclusionary housing have been strong at the local level. In fact, over 100 cities and counties have adopted inclusionary housing as a local policy. …