In Defense of Flexible Zoning

Why COS Conservatives, Liberals, Environmentalists, and Housing Advocates should be excited about Flexible Zoning and want more of it

By Benedict Wright

With over 1 million people predicted to live in El Paso County by 2050, a question on everyone’s mind should be, ‘where the hell are all these people going to live?’. This question is both obvious and deeply consequential for the coming generations’ quality of life and the quality of the environment which they will inhabit. The question of housing in the City of Colorado Springs in particular should be top of mind for anyone, liberal or conservative, who wants to see this city and its people prosper.

It is for that reason that we should all be excited about flexible zoning—an experimental zoning regime recently proposed by RetoolCOS, the city commission working to update and modernize where and how people can build in the city. Essentially, the proposal would regulate the number of units per acre by density rather than lot size. The hope is that this new way of parsing land would streamline development, allow for more mixed density neighborhoods, and generally increase the density and supply of housing in the city.

Why is this important? Please see paragraph one: we are going to need more housing. To oversimplify a little, unless we want to artificially curb economic growth, more people are going to keep moving here and those people are going to need places to live. Already the city is struggling to keep up with demand, and housing prices have risen rapidly as a result. Earlier this month, the Gazette reported that a recent report from Nationwide Economics showed Colorado Springs to be “one of the least affordable housing markets in the country.”

Unless Colorado Springs wants to face a crisis of housing availability and affordability—accompanied by the woes of gentrification and displacement—we are going to have face a choice: build out or build up.

Building out has a certain logic to it: land is cheaper, it’s easy to displace cows and prairie dogs, and a lot of people like the idea of a big green lawn out in the suburbs. For these reasons—along with restrictive zoning, highways, and automobiles—Colorado Springs has sprawled immensely during the past 70 years.

However, all of this has come with a heavy cost—long, stressful, lonely, expensive commutes; water and energy intensive lifestyles; the destruction of plant and animal habitat; not to mention a fraught history of racialized housing discrimination.

A better way, it seems, is to build up, and Colorado Springs, slowly but surely, is doing just that. With the adoption of PlanCOS in 2019, the city pledged to focus on building more densely, and RetoolCOS’s latest proposal of flexible zoning fits in line with that vision—at least to an extent. The proposal addresses the zoning of new infill or sprawling developments and does not touch the political hot potato of existing single-family zoning nor does it do away with low density living (the lowest density flex-district would actually allow for even lower density than the existing lowest density district).  

Flex-zoning in its proposed form is insufficient, but the logic driving it is sound. According to a May 2020 article published by the Brookings Institution, “As the nation recovers from the pandemic, it is essential to expand the supply of lower-cost rental housing. Allowing developers more flexibility in land use and reducing the procedural barriers to development would make building apartments less expensive.”  

At the top of this essay, I said that persons of all political persuasions should get behind these moves by RetoolCOS, and I really do mean that. For conservatives and market-oriented liberals, relaxing zoning allows investment to flow unencumbered by the city. The path of heading off an affordability crisis by increasing the supply of housing should be preferable to a fight over rent controls and massive housing subsidies—which would surely come if this problem is left to fester.

At the same time, those on the left moved by the injustice of displacement, homelessness, and inequality should see the move to build more housing as addressing a root cause of housing inaccessibly. While building more and denser housing may not be sufficient to meet the needs of those experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity right now, we can all agree, in order to house people, we need to have houses.