Attainable Kirkwood Part 1: Minimum Lot Sizes

This is Part 1 of a series on politically-workable ways to add housing in Kirkwood and make living here more attainable. This piece covers the topic of minimum lot sizes and lot splitting, while Part 2 covers ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units).

Last August, Webster voters killed the two-family zoning provision that their elected representatives on city council had passed just a few months earlier. Then, in December, that same council matched their constituents and unanimously rejected the proposed SG Collaborative development, a project that would have added around 1,000 new units of housing to the community.

These rejections of additional housing in Kirkwood’s sister suburb have led me to significantly re-calculate what’s possible within our own borders. But before we get to feasible solutions, let’s briefly recap Kirkwood’s current housing problem.

Where We Stand

Kirkwood’s population was essentially flat from 2000 to 2019, adding less than 500 residents over that time. Then, when measured again in April 2020, the population had boomed, adding more than 1,500 people in a single year. Now obviously April 2020 featured a lot of unique circumstances —a once-every-ten-year census, a global pandemic that saw a lot of people flee to the suburbs, etc— but the 2021 population estimate was nearly the same as 2020’s, which means we’re not just looking at some one-off blip, but a more sustained trend.

Then, if we look at home prices, we see that the cost of living in Kirkwood rose throughout our 2000-2019 period of slow population growth and then began skyrocketing after the 2020 boom year.

This relationship doesn’t lend itself to easy interpretation but If I were to offer my take, here’s what I think happened: Kirkwood’s housing market had long been tight (i.e. more people wanted to live here than we had homes for) which is why we see the price gradually tick up, but it also had some natural slack built into it for a bunch of different reasons:

• Some empty-nesters still owned the large home they raised their families in even though they no longer needed as much room
• A bunch of new multi-family housing came on-line in Kirkwood in the mid-2000s keeping supply closer in line with our growing demand
• The 2008/2009 financial crisis, the subsequent Great Recession, and finally the long slow recovery that followed all kept the economy suppressed and home prices from rising as fast as they otherwise might have

Then, all those things went away. The Great Recession killed the production of new apartments in Kirkwood, leading to just two multifamily project being completed from 2010-2020 and keeping supply essentially flat, the Fed finally got us back to full employment at the end of 2019 meaning the economy got hot and lots more people could afford to bid up the price of homes, and most recently, COVID happened and the empty-nesters said “screw, it, clearly some young family with kids values this big house with the big yard in the good school-district a lot more than we do,” sold their home at what they took to be the peak of the market, and moved to Clayton. So then you run out of slack. All the empty units are rented out, all the underutilized homes are sold to families that most value them, and then there’s nowhere else to find any new homes unless you build them.

Because very few new units are being added, buyers are stuck fighting over whatever comes available and have to compete with one another by increasing their bids. As a result, prices rise and buying a home in Kirkwood becomes less and less attainable. The result sucks: Young adults can’t raise kids of their own in the community where they grew up and seniors who have spent most of their lives here are no longer able to afford it.

It won’t come as any secret that I think this is a big problem, but it’s also a problem that’s very difficult to solve. The current strategy of build-a-new-apartment-building-downtown-every-three-years-and-hope-for-the-best clearly isn’t working, but then there’s Webster looming over there as a cautionary tale as to what happens if you try to undertake a more ambitious strategy and alter things at a larger scale.

How to Solve It

So how do you thread the needle between policy changes that are large enough to actually help and subtle enough that the community will allow them to go forward? I think to move that needle, policies need to meet two criteria:

1. The logic of the policy change has to be so simple and so obvious that it can be labeled a common-sense, no-brainer, and
2. The policy change will make all stakeholders in Kirkwood better off, including homeowners, homebuyers, renters, AND businesses.

I think the two solutions that adhere most closely to these win-win and no-brainer criteria are legalizing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and reducing minimum lot sizes (MLS). We’re going to start with minimum lot sizes today and then after Labor Day weekend, we’ll return to discuss ADUs. Let’s dive in.

What Are Minimum Lot Sizes?

Minimum lot sizes are a sub-section of our single-family zoning that determine how large a piece of property has to be before a home is allowed. In Kirkwood’s case, we have four different Minimum Lot Sizes:

So these minimum lot sizes essentially say that in “beige” Kirkwood, if you own 7,500 sq ft of property, we’ll allow you to build yourself a home and raise a family but in “cream” Kirkwood, don’t even think about it unless you own 43,560 sq ft, an area roughly the size of a football field.

In my ideal world, the same rules would apply to all: 7,500 sq ft becomes the new universal minimum and our four single-family zones are condensed down to just one. By all means, keep your bigger lot if you want, but 7,500 sq ft is all that’s required.

A Quick Note on the Flooding Issue

Now to head off any easy pushback to this idea, many of the areas that are currently zoned for 1-acre minimums, especially those in Sugar Creek and along the Meramec, are vulnerable to flooding, which is just about the only conceivable defense of maintaining multiple different minimum lot sizes. Obviously, the more impervious surfaces you have in an area, the less space you give for water runoff to percolate through the ground, so here you really would have to be a little careful to make sure you don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.

My preferred solution would be a flood-zone overlay based on an objective measure of flood risk (kind of like you see the Community Unit Plan overlays as the red-striped areas on the map). This flood-zone overlay might maintain larger lot minimums in part but would also regulate other relevant things, perhaps mandating, for example, permeable driveways and rain gardens be included in any development plans, mostly though, it would tell you exactly why this part of Kirkwood required different rules rather than the seeming random patchwork we currently have.

How Lowering Minimum Lot Sizes Adds Housing

Reducing the minimum lot size isn’t going to change much on its own. Kirkwood has already been divided into lots and the lots are the sizes that they are. So there’s one more tweak we have to make for reducing minimum lot sizes to have the desired effect: Tweak the lot-splitting process.

When new lots do form, it almost exclusively happens through lot-splitting: taking one lot and splitting it into multiple developable lots. When you do this, each of those lots has to meet the minimum lot size that the area is zoned for.

In order to get approval to split your lot, you have to make your case to the Planning and Zoning Committee and City Council. Because this application requires a land survey, it can be prohibitively costly (a service that runs more than $2500 for a small lot). When you add in the possibility that your application could be denied on a whim, only the rich can afford to give it a shot.

If we want to make the process fair, we need to make this lot-splitting process into a bureaucratic one where approval is simply a matter of whether your application meets the criteria and includes the required materials. If you own a 20,000 sq ft parcel, you submit your land survey and paperwork to split that lot to the Planning Department, they make sure both of your proposed lots meet the 7,500 sq ft minimum and as long as your paperwork is all there, they make note of the change on their maps, stamp “Approved” in big red letters on application, and everyone moves on.

Then, as you make the process easier, and expand the pool of lots eligible for splitting, you’d expect to get more of it. Not a ton, and not all at once, but on some occasions, especially in the case of tear-downs, it would make sense to split a lot in half and build two single-family homes where you previously could only build one.

A More Vibrant Downtown

If we look back at our zoning map, we’ll see that this simple change could also make Kirkwood both more walkable and economically vibrant. That’s because nearly the entire portion of Kirkwood that falls East of Downtown requires lots that are 15,000 sq ft, twice as big as the newly proposed minimum and what the lots to the West of Downtown are forced to abide by. The exceptions to that rule, the little patch of green (25,000 sq ft) and the pale yellow block sitting between Madison and Monroe right along Kirkwood’s eastern border (43,560 sq ft) are even more egregious.

Cutting minimum lot sizes down by half (or two thirds, or more) sounds scary, but if you think about those lots West of Downtown (homes that fall between Downtown Kirkwood and Kirkwood Park) they’re by no means schlubby. In fact, they comprise some of the most prized real estate in Kirkwood.

So a change here —just allowing the neighborhoods East of Downtown to emulate the agreeable model of those West of Downtown— would add housing in one of the most efficient parts of Kirkwood: a part of Kirkwood within easy walking and biking distance of Downtown’s restaurants, shops, bus routes, and civic buildings. As a result, reforming minimum lot sizes would mean adding residents where they are most likely to help our local businesses and the least likely to add to traffic or to strain parking capacity.

Everyone Wins

I think the potential win-wins from reducing minimum lot sizes are visible everywhere you look. In addition to addressing concerns about fairness, standardizing minimum lot sizes unlocks economic prosperity for everyone in the community. For property owners, it means that they can keep their property exactly the same if they want to and when they finally go to sell, their property will be worth a whole lot more because they’re selling the development rights to what could potentially be two or three homes in the future. Alternatively, if they’d like to stay where they are and capitalize immediately, they can split the unused half of their lot and sell it and pocket a nice little return on their investment right away.

People that own a home that’s already on the minimum sized 7,500 sq ft lot won’t be able to capitalize immediately (we’ll have to wait for next week’s ADU article for that!), but they will enjoy better city services from the tax revenue the homes built on split lots bring in.

And those that don’t own property at all, those that rent in Kirkwood or would like to move to Kirkwood if they could afford to, will benefit from us growing the supply of Kirkwood homes. The more homes Kirkwood has, the less people are forced to bid up the price in order to secure their place here and the more attainable paying Kirkwood rent or buying a Kirkwood starter-home becomes.

Sharing the Secret: Housing Reform and Political Populism

Back when I was teaching in Denver, veteran teachers used to talk about “sharing the secret.” In teaching, that meant telling the kids exactly what you were looking for when you were grading their work or telling them exactly why you were teaching something the way you were. That way they would have a concrete model to aspire to rather than just trying to guess what the teacher was up to. I think it’s smart to do the same here. I have some reach but most of my reach comes from the second conversations you all are having with people who don’t read Gadfly. So here’s the secret:

Polling has suggested that centering economic arguments (like I just attempted to do) is the most effective way to gain public support in building new housing. Even in places as liberal and diverse as New York City these economic arguments outperform other arguments (equity, environmental, etc) across the board.

There are few more purely economic arguments than “we shouldn’t have a part of town where the rules say you have to be explicitly richer to live there than you do in other parts of town.” What’s the point of that rule? Who or what does it protect? If 7,500 sq ft is good enough in some parts of Kirkwood, it should be good for all of Kirkwood. So let’s simplify the zoning code and let’s restore Kirkwood’s status as a home to the middle class.

Thanks for reading, have a wonderful Labor Day weekend, and I’ll see you next week to talk ADUs!