St. Louis County Should Lead on Zoning

I’ve long been a big fan of the sort of baseline liberal agenda the County Council and County Exec Sam Page have been able to implement on a number of fronts: paid maternity leave, the elimination of salary compensation history in the application process for county jobs, a $15 minimum wage for all county employees, and preliminary attempts at funding affordable housing . On so many fronts, through an equal combination of the City’s legislation stagnation and the county’s significant political improvement post-Stenger, St. Louis County has emerged at the region’s politically progressive heavyweight. But St. Louis County government still has one card to play that would make all those previous improvements look merely quaint: A wholesale revision of the County’s (currently exclusionary) zoning code.

Up until very recently, zoning & housing reform has not fallen cleanly on either side of the political spectrum. Because housing reform itself mostly looks like de-regulation and smaller government, there was a chance that the issue aligned more closely with libertarian, limited-government-interference elements of the political Right. On the other hand, the actual effects of these reforms —reduced homelessness, further racial integration, lower environmental impact, lower childhood poverty—all fall neatly within the political Left’s goals (if not its typical method of arriving to them). But recently this dynamic seems to have been resolved. President Trump has begun to suggest that more equitable housing is bad, the implication being that lowering housing costs means more lower income (and thus more Black and brown people), moving into the more desirable, higher opportunity neighborhoods previously sheltered by de facto segregation.

Donald Trump’s support of single family housing leaves the political path for reform finally clear for Democrats. But this is not like most partisan issues and despite Trump’s tweets the issue of housing is not one decided at the Federal level, but rather in state capitals, county seats and in the quiet conference rooms where planning commissions huddle and slog through procedure. I’d like to make the argument that it is ripe time for the Democrat-dominated county government to take up this mantle, demonstratively improve people’s lives and signal to other liberal-minded municipalities in the county that it might be time to do the same. Other progressive cities have begun to take up this issue and have these discussions. And while cities like Portland, Oregon making progress might not inspire all that much confidence that this is workable here, cities like Minneapolis and states like Virginia making headway, should. St. Louis County government is a liberal institution. In fact, I might argue that it is the most liberal thing about St. Louis County. Here’s the chance to prove it.

The Agenda

So to sign-post how the rest of this piece is going to go, we are going to first, examine the current state of the county’s zoning; second, take a look a what reform would actually entail; and third, walk through the process for actually implementing those changes as described by the county charter.

Current St. Louis County Zoning

So this might be a little disappointing given how I’ve framed this so far, but St. Louis County unfortunately does not have any say on the zoning of municipalities that fall within it’s borders. It’s jurisdiction falls, instead, strictly within the minority of the county that is unincorporated. The good news is that while this unincorporated area is geographically small, much of it is ideally located for denser development. The two largest swaths of unincorporated territory fall in the far northeast and southeast of the county (don’t worry there’s a map coming up here in a second). These are areas both very close to the job center that is downtown St. Louis and thus incentives against exurban sprawl (most of which is motivated by the lower price points available out West) and all the negative externalities that entails.

Perhaps even more significantly though, these two nodes lie right along at least some extended versions of the proposed North-South MetroLink, (or more recently, BRT) expansion. Investing in public transit is expensive, the return on that investment is largely determined by how many people that public transit services; many more people can be serviced when we start building duplexes and apartments along the route.

The portion of St. Louis County that is unincorporated is also likely to grow the coming years. Many smaller municipalities in recent years have begun to dissolve due to financial insolvency (itself a result of municipal financing/predatory policing reforms and shrinking local sales tax revenue due to online retail and exasperated by a COVID saddled economy). As they disincorporate, the land of these former municipalities will again be subject to the planning and zoning rules of the county itself, thus increasing the impact of these suggested reforms.

Within these unincorporated areas, the vast majority of land is set aside for single family housing (with the exception of properties zoned R5 which allows for things like town homes but not apartments or condos). In the map above the portions depicted in orange and yellow allow exclusively single family homes while the areas in brown are those which allow multi-family housing. If you’re not seeing a lot of brown, don’t worry, neither am I. In order to have a substantial impact, to substantially reduce the price of housing, we don’t have to do a whole lot. All we need is to take some of the huge areas in orange and make it so you’re allowed to build a duplex if you wanted to.

This is What Zoning Reform Looks Like

So if we did convince the council and county exec to make a move on this, the question shifts from whether reform is needed to what reform would look like. The most obvious change would be to rewrite the zoning code to allow for multi-family homes in more places, but this change alone is likely not enough to have a real impact without further tweaks. Rules regarding maximum building height, minimum lot size, setbacks, maximum density and minimum required parking would also need to be relaxed to allow these multi-family homes to actually be built.

Process for Reform

After developing the plan, the question shifts one final time from what to change to how to change it. The process for implementing these changes is definitely workable but it’s also not super straight forward, so let’s take a closer look. The relevant portion of the zoning ordinance reads as follows:

Whenever the public necessity, convenience, general welfare, and good zoning practice require, the County Council may, after a public hearing and report thereon by the Planning Commission and subject to the procedure provided in this Section, amend, supplement, or change the regulations, zoning district boundaries or classification of property now or hereafter established by this Chapter.

It continues,

Amendment, supplement, reclassification or change may be initiated by a resolution of intention by the Planning Commission or the County Council,…

And concludes, and here’s the key section,

No ordinance relating to zoning or special procedure which is contrary to a recommendation of a majority of the members of the Planning Commission shall be adopted by the County Council, except by an affirmative vote of two-thirds of the members of the County Council. No provision herein shall be construed to prevent the County Council from initiating the procedure provided in this section by a resolution of intention at any time.

So that leaves us with two options for reform:

1. The County Council votes to change the zoning ordinance and the Planning Commission agrees with the changes and votes to affirm them, thus rendering the process complete or…
2. The County Council votes to change the zoning ordinance, the Planning Commission disagrees and votes against the proposal. This would then put the ball back in the County Council’s court who would need a 2/3rds majority (5 votes) to overrule the Commission.

The Planning Commission itself consists of seven members appointed by the County Executive to serve three year terms, so they theoretically are people sympathetic to similarly liberal points of view as the Democrat(s) that appoint them. (Currently there are only seven members listed on the county website so I’m unclear whether there are currently vacancies or the website just hasn’t been updated).

If you couldn’t get the Planning Commission on board with reform, a fifth County Council vote (assuming you could get all four democrats) would have to found amongst the three remaining republicans to overrule it. On one hand, given the current polarization of the council, this would be a very hard (impossible?) ask. But on the other hand, this reform, as I said earlier, is essentially a push for deregulation and smaller government interference in markets, meaning there is potentially some hope that you could get a principled conservative to join the initiative. (My greatest hope is that maybe our very own representative, Tim Fitch of District 3, would be the Republican to take this stand).

The other path that I’d like to note quickly is that there’s a chance that Democrats could get to 5 votes outright after November. Republican Ernie Trakas, the most explicitly anti-housing member of the council (he once told the council “We have enough apartments in south county”), faces a tough challenge in former Missouri House District 93 rep, Bob Burns. District 6 is both flippable, (especially in as high a turnout election as November is bound to be) and strategically important due to the fact that the vast majority of its land falls within unincorporated portions of the county. (If you’d like to donate to Bob like I did, you can do so here).

El Fin

I’ve long focused mostly on how to effect housing reform in Kirkwood, but it is hard to convince a moderate town to take the sort of steps I want them to take when I don’t have an example of anyone else in the region doing it. Kirkwood is not likely to be at the leading edge of policy reform or innovation, but St. Louis County might be. It would set an example for first Richmond Heights, and then Maplewood, and then Webster to do the same. And one day, a thousand years from now, maybe, just maybe, Kirkwood could boldly step towards justice too. The calvary isn’t coming. Unfortunately this isn’t something E. Warren or Cory Booker or some policy at HUD can solve, it’s a thing that has to be taken on at the local level. So we should. Do it and be legends.

Action Items:

I have also decided that I should start ending these posts with action items as a way of translating these posts into real political action, so this week:

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