code change

From Jim Kinney Friends and neighbors, I hope you all have had a chance to study the draft City of Lakewood Zoning Code being pushed forward by what appears to be the majority of City Council, the Mayor, and the City Manager and the Director of Planning. The new code is being “sold” as the answer to fix the problem that our City needs affordable housing. Minneapolis was the first city in the nation to abandon the single family zoning category, in about 2018, thinking that action was the answer to magically have the city filled with affordable housing. The article, Counterpoint: Upending Single-family Zoning Isn’t the Answer: Like many zombie ideas, the idea that zoning changes will magically provide abundant affordable housing just doesn’t die, was written by Linda McDonald, of Minneapolis, who is a former City Council member and is one of the founding members of the citizen group Minneapolis For Everyone. The following quote is taken from her article (my highlighting). “In addition, the Urban Institute found no evidence that more low-cost housing was built, or that lower-cost housing became less expensive when zoning was reduced. This isn’t surprising. The real reason new housing is so expensive is that the costs to build — lumber, copper, labor, etc. — have been increasing much faster than inflation. The private marketplace simply cannot produce deeply affordable housing, the housing critical for truly low-income persons. In Minneapolis, there has been an increase in deeply affordable housing, but only because the city has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies.” The draft Lakewood zoning codes proposes abandoning single-family zoning to solve the City’s lack of affordable housing. It has already been shown this approach has very little effect producing affordable housing. Tell City Council, the City Manager and the Director of Planning to abandon these draft new zoning codes, that abandoning single-family zoning is not the answer. If there is a reason to rewrite our current City Zoning codes, it is not to remove single-family zoning as the answer to magically adding abundant affordable housing. Educate yourself. Stand up and speak up. Council is planning on voting to make these disastrous draft codes our City law on August 25, 2025. In democracy,Jim Kinney