As a professional town planner working primarily on zoning code changes to increase housing choice and availability in small towns, I am frequently asked what zoning code changes I would make if I could just wave a magic wand. There are five changes which, if adopted by towns, I believe would ease the creation of housing, particularly housing at below market rates. In order of importance, but not necessarily ease of implementation, my five easy pieces of code reform are:
Eliminate parking requirements. Across the board. Everywhere. The state has started the
process by passing a statute that prohibits jurisdictions from requiring more than one parking place for each dwelling unit. That’s a good start, but I would like to see towns turn parking decisions over to the builders. Let the market decide how many parking spaces are necessary for all uses. Planning professionals are really bad at predicting how much parking a given use requires, so let’s stop pretending we know and let the market decide.
A corollary to this is that I would like to require towns to allow year-round on-street parking. Right now, we treat ease of snowplowing as more important than housing our residents. Other places where it snows allow year-round on-street parking and New Hampshire towns should do the same. The added advantage of allowing on-street parking is that it is the easiest and cheapest way to slow traffic in our residential neighborhoods. Let’s stop valuing snow removal over housing our residents.
Allow a four-unit building on any lot. All of our historic neighborhoods, the neighborhoods we consider the most beautiful, have small multi-unit buildings that were built before zoning’s obsession with single-unit buildings. Let’s make it possible to build new, house-sized multi-unit buildings. We are never going to solve the housing issues by keeping the majority of our residentially zoned parcels restricted to one or two units. A four-plex is a house in the eyes of the federal loan programs; let’s make them legal everywhere.
Allow two accessory dwelling units on every lot. Attached, detached, in an existing building or in a new build, ADUs are the most unobtrusive way of adding housing to existing neighborhoods. ADUs allow older residents to reduce the cost of their housing either by renting out the ADU or by moving into the ADU. For residents whose big houses no longer work for them because of finances or mobility challenges, ADUs can be a fantastic solution. ADUs are also a solution for the 30% of all one-person households. One person living alone doesn’t need or even want a big place, and ADUs can fill that gap at an attainable price.
Allow cottage courts in any district and allow the cottages and their small lots to be sold as individual units. Cottage courts are a group of small, individual cottages arranged around a common green. They’re very attractive, they provide community, and they work for the 60% of households with only one or two members.
Allow the adaptive reuse of any existing building for as many residential units as will fit in the existing building, regardless of the lot size requirements of the underlying zoning. The building is already there, and allowing it to be used to its full capacity means it is more likely to be rehabbed and put back into service. We have lots of large buildings on small lots that can’t be converted into multi-unit buildings because the lot is technically too small. Let’s allow those buildings to be productive again, because if they sit empty because the code says the lot is too small, they will eventually fall into disrepair and demolition by neglect. More units can make that building a financially realistic project and create more value for the town.
So which is the most important? Parking is definitely the most constrictive, but it’s a difficult conversation to have. Adaptive reuse is probably the easiest to explain and has been adopted, but any of these would be a step in the direction of creating both more housing and more housing choice.
Peterborough resident Ivy Vann is a certified planner with the American Planning Association, the Congress for New Urbanism and the Form-Based Code Institute of Smart Growth America. A longtime planning board member, she also served in the New Hampshire state legislature from 2014 to 2022.