For Star subscribers: A legislative proposal to override zoning laws in Arizona's cities appears dead, but the problem of inadequate housing persists. Tucson's guest-house program shows the city should move faster.
Tim Steller Tucson and other cities seem to have defeated a legislative effort to take away local power over zoning and housing.Cities need to make the moves that will get more housing built, especially the affordable kind, for their increasingly outpriced residents.
It’s going to take some resilience. But in Tucson, the council has been moving that direction, and has a chance to go further next week. They probably simply need to move faster if they’re going to make a dent in our housing problem. Kaiser’s conclusion, informed in part by the housing industry itself, is that one of the biggest obstacles to affordable housing is the cities. So he proposed what amounted to a state takeover of important parts of the zoning code, proposing to remove the cities’ ability to say no to housing developments in many cases.
After the bill failed on the Senate floor, Sen. Anna Hernandez, the only Democrat who voted for SB 1117, put the challenge to cities this way via Twitter: The idea was that people could build guest houses in their own backyards, many of which are generous in the older parts of Tucson, and these could serve as housing for older relatives or students or others needing relatively inexpensive housing.At a March 6, City Council study session, Planning Administrator Koren Manning noted that the city received a total of 61 applications for permits for accessory dwelling units in the program’s first year.
None of these is a revolutionary change or as sweeping as the proposals in Kaiser’s bill. They would start to make it easier, though, to build more housing, more densely in a city that needs to evolve.
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