Apartments are safer and more affordable than single-family homes. Why do we treat them like a hazard?

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that, for more than a century, American urban planning has been devoted to layering on ways to all but ban apartment buildings. And so, as the US now tries to shift out of the anti-density gear that’s driving our housing affordability crisis, policymakers are finding that there are obstacles hiding in a lot of places. Like, a lot.

States and cities are already working, little by little, to roll back the foundational problem often blamed for the current housing shortage: our rigid system of zoning, which dictates what kinds of buildings can be built where. Exclusionary zoning is the reason that it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home on most residential land in the US, making homes scarce, spread out, and unaffordable.

Less appreciated but perhaps just as culpable are the labyrinthine rules governing how new homes must be built — the materials, safety features, and other requirements that make up the entrails of American buildings.

Increasingly, housing abundance advocates, home builders, and policymakers are discovering that fixing zoning is merely the entry point into a gauntlet of other constraints. Especially in the quest to build more “missing middle” housing — duplexes, triplexes, and small and mid-size apartment buildings. “Simply allowing a fourplex on paper does not guarantee that one will be built,” John Zeanah, the chief of development and infrastructure for Memphis, wrote in a recent report on non-zoning barriers to housing for the Center for Building in North America, a nonprofit that advocates for reforming US and Canadian building codes to align them with other affluent countries.

Why? Even as cities re-legalize the traditional housing forms that once supported economic mobility and urban vitality in America, extremely strict, sometimes ill-considered building codes and other requirements can quickly make them financially infeasible to build.









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