Allow capacity
Replace low unit caps with flexible form, height, and floor-area rules.
01
Apartments
Make room for apartments, shops, and neighbors
Stop reserving most well-located land for the most expensive kind of home. Let more people live near jobs, schools, shops, and opportunity.
In plain English
Stop reserving most well-located land for only one detached home. Let apartments, condominiums, and homes above shops be ordinary neighbors.
How it works
Remove the barrier. Let homes respond.
Make it usable
Avoid setbacks, parking rules, and discretionary hearings that erase the new capacity.
Let supply respond
As viable projects are completed, households have more choices than under scarcity.
The implementation test
Real reform or paper promise?
Legalizing an apartment does not require anyone to sell, demolish a home, or build one. It gives property owners another option when change eventually occurs.
TestStrongWeak or symbolic
Coverage
StrongApplies across many residential and commercial areas.
Weak or symbolicConfined to a few parcels or hostile corridors.
Feasibility
StrongHeight, floor area, setbacks, and fees work together.
Weak or symbolicNominal capacity is erased by conflicting rules.
Approval
StrongCompliant homes receive administrative approval.
Weak or symbolicEvery proposal faces an unpredictable political hearing.
Strong policy principles
- Apply reform broadly enough to create a competitive land market.
- Permit housing by right when objective health and safety rules are met.
- Allow homes above shops and along ordinary commercial streets.
- Pair capacity with infrastructure planning rather than using infrastructure as a permanent veto.
Watch for
- Token corridors
- Unusable affordability mandates
- Long discretionary reviews
- Capacity counted on implausible parcels
Pair it with
- Affordable-housing funds
- Transit and utility investment
- Tenant relocation assistance
- Tree-canopy and stormwater standards
Measure whether it works
- Homes permitted and completed
- Approval time
- Share of parcels where projects are feasible
- Rent and vacancy relative to comparable places
In practice
What this reform looks like on the ground.
Auckland, New ZealandOperative in 2016
Auckland Unitary Plan
Auckland broadly expanded residential capacity across roughly three quarters of its residential land instead of concentrating change in a handful of sites.
Lesson
Scale matters. A broad reform creates many feasible locations and reduces the chance that a small set of newly valuable parcels captures the entire benefit.
Evidence status
Peer-reviewed studies in this library report a substantial permitting response and rents below a synthetic no-reform path. Those estimates remain specific to Auckland and their methods.
Related evidence
See the Auckland construction study ↗ (opens in a new tab)Greenaway-McGrevy & Phillips (2023) · Greenaway-McGrevy & So (2026)
Why support it?
The evidence behind the solution.
Strong evidence
A city cannot build homes it has made illegal.
Legalize real projects across enough land and builders respond. Auckland did this at city scale and saw a large permitting boom; narrower reforms have usually delivered less.
Keep in mind: Permission is necessary but not sufficient. Financing, land, construction costs, approval time, and demand determine whether newly legal homes are actually built.
Strong evidence
More homes give renters more leverage.
Across citywide reforms and individual projects, more housing means lower rents than continued scarcity. Sometimes rents fall. In fast-growing places, they may simply rise less.
Keep in mind: No serious evidence says every project lowers every rent immediately. Magnitudes vary, and booming demand can still push nominal rents upward while new supply restrains that increase.
Strong evidence
Legal on paper is not the same as buildable in practice.
A reform can promise density and still bury it under tiny maps, parking ratios, setbacks, fees, hearings, and delay. Good reform makes ordinary projects legal, feasible, and predictable.
Keep in mind: Chicago's narrow reform produced no detectable building increase in its early years. That helps show why scale, feasibility, and follow-through matter.
Figure 3 · Synthetic and actual rental price indexes
The actual and synthetic rent indexes track closely before 2016 and separate after the reform.
REDRAWN FROM STUDY DATAFigure 3 · Synthetic and actual rental price indexes
| Year | Actual Auckland | No-reform comparison |
|---|---|---|
| 2000 | -0.632 | -0.621 |
| 2001 | -0.611 | -0.61 |
| 2002 | -0.531 | -0.57 |
| 2003 | -0.456 | -0.517 |
| 2004 | -0.435 | -0.463 |
| 2005 | -0.426 | -0.426 |
| 2006 | -0.406 | -0.372 |
| 2007 | -0.353 | -0.316 |
| 2008 | -0.314 | -0.275 |
| 2009 | -0.311 | -0.27 |
| 2010 | -0.276 | -0.236 |
| 2011 | -0.225 | -0.211 |
| 2012 | -0.187 | -0.182 |
| 2013 | -0.151 | -0.173 |
| 2014 | -0.108 | -0.145 |
| 2015 | -0.046 | -0.094 |
| 2016 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 0.04 | 0.078 |
| 2018 | 0.068 | 0.151 |
| 2019 | 0.094 | 0.246 |
| 2020 | 0.117 | 0.307 |
| 2021 | 0.145 | 0.394 |
| 2022 | 0.167 | 0.47 |
Figure 2 · Rent event studies
Both comparison strategies turn negative after treatment; the vertical bars show uncertainty.
REDRAWN FROM STUDY DATAFigure 2 · Rent event studies
| Years relative to opening | Near–far comparison | Near–near comparison |
|---|---|---|
| −3 | 0.01 | 0.02 |
| −2 | 0 | -0.01 |
| −1 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | -0.05 | -0.045 |
| +1 | -0.065 | -0.06 |
| +2 | -0.055 | -0.05 |
| +3 | -0.05 | -0.075 |