Sid Friedman: Cutting local lot minimums would increase affordability

Rachel Thompson/News-Register

##Sid Friedman

About the writer: Sid Friedman has lived in Yamhill County since 1980. He has extensive experience with local planning issues, having served on the Yamhill County Planning Commission and both the McMinnville and Newberg Urban Area Management commissions. He’s worked for 1000 Friends of Oregon, a statewide land use organization. He’s a member of both organizations as well, though the views expressed here are his own.

In communities large and small around the country, housing affordability is an issue of major concern. Too many working families don’t earn enough to pay rent or cover a mortgage without foregoing other necessities.

This is especially true in McMinnville, where our low-wage, tourist-centered hospitality industry drags our average household income below the state and county averages. The hospitality industry has the lowest average pay of any local job sector, making it far more difficult for workers to cover rent or mortgage payments.

And income deficiency is only one part of the problem. The housing being developed in McMinnville is too expensive as well.

McMinnville has close to 1,700 acres of vacant buildable land in its urban growth boundary, so lack of land in the UGB is not what is driving up housing prices.

A critical factor that is driving up housing costs is McMinnville’s large minimum lot sizes. This restricts the number of houses or apartments that can be built when vacant land is developed.

Less housing per acre means higher cost per housing unit. It also means higher taxes to extend more sewer lines, water lines and roads over a broader area. And, of course, using more land for the same number of homes increases the pressure to pave over valuable farmland.

As the accompanying chart shows, McMinnville’s minimum residential lot sizes are much larger than those of similarly situated cities nearby, and its planned density-number of units per acre- is thus much lower.

Most of McMinnville’s residential land is in low-density R-1 and R-2 zones.

McMinnville’s minimum lot size in R-1 is 9,000 square feet, allowing about 3.6 houses per acre, after accounting for roads. By comparison, it’s 5,000 square feet in Newberg, allowing about 6.5 houses per acre, or nearly double.

McMinnville’s minimum lot size in R-2 is 7,000 square feet, Newberg’s 3,000. That’s an even greater disparity.

When an area is planned and zoned for a certain number of homes, minimum density standards help ensure something close to that is built. But McMinnville has not adopted such standards, unlike Newberg and many other cities.

This is not just a land-capacity issue, math exercise or numbers game.

McMinnville’s large minimum lot sizes have real life consequences, raising the cost to rent or buy for every family in town. They effectively exclude people of more moderate means from large parts of the city.

To their credit, the city’s elected officials and staff planners recognize past development patterns have failed to meet the needs of McMinnville residents.

The city has committees working on a plan for most of the vacant residential land in the UGB, with affordability in mind. It is separately working on “efficiency measures” to better use the land it has available.

But if the city’s excessively large minimum lot sizes remain unchanged, and it fails to adopt density standards, we will miss a golden opportunity to allow more housing units people can afford to rent or buy.

More than 20 years ago, the issue of minimum lot sizes and density standards was raised to the city in a joint letter from a consortium of affordable housing providers and advocates, including the Housing Authority, the Yamhill Community Development Corporation, the Salvation Army, YCAP, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Lutheran Community Services, Henderson House and St. Vincent de Paul. And both Friends of Yamhill County and 1000 Friends of Oregon lent support.

But in all that time, the city’s very large minimum lot sizes have not changed and minimum density standards have not been adopted. This issue is long past due for addressing.

To make more homes and apartments affordable for more families, McMinnville needs to adopt minimum lot sizes that are in line with comparable nearby communities, along with minimum density standards, as the housing consortium requested more than 20 years ago.