Can zoning solve Iowa City's housing, redistricting issues?

Affordable housing advocates, educators and some community members believe city government could provide a long-term solution to one of the Iowa City school district's most vexing problems.

Requiring that developments include homes that are affordable to people with low-to-moderate incomes, a concept known as inclusionary zoning, would help alleviate the high concentration of poor students in certain schools, they say.

The school board is expected to vote in May on a plan to redraw school boundaries, or redistricting, as it is known. Currently, there are a few schools with high percentages of poor students, while some schools have few of these students. Some people want redistricting to address that.

Studies show poor students, in general, score lower on standardized tests and present more challenges for educators.

The community is finding that correcting the imbalance would require busing some kids away from their neighborhood schools. That's because low-income housing in the Iowa City area tends to be concentrated in certain neighborhoods.

Scattering affordable housing, the thinking goes, would scatter lower income students throughout the district.

“It would prevent a situation like this from happening 20 years down the road, and it would help (address) the imbalances that we have right now,” said Jerry Anthony, a University of Iowa urban and regional planning professor who has studied affordable housing.

The idea melds two of the biggest hot-button issues in the Iowa City community in recent months: affordable housing and redistricting.

Inclusionary zoning

The City Council discussed inclusionary zoning in March, but a divided council decided it did not like the idea of requiring builders to include a certain number of affordable homes in new developments.

The issue is not dead, however. Council members asked staff to collect more information, including the possibility of using incentives to encourage developers to mix in affordable homes in their projects.

Staff note that these are homes that young professionals, teachers and police officers, for example, could afford, and it's different from subsidized housing.

A committee under the Johnson County Council of Governments, a countywide planning agency, also has discussed the issue.

Nationally, more than 200 communities have inclusionary zoning, according to Iowa City staff.

One of those is Boulder, Colo., which has had what it calls inclusionary housing for 10 years. It requires new developments to contribute the equivalent of 20 percent of units to affordable housing. At least half of those units must be built in the development, and the other half can be provided as a cash payment or with units off-site.

The maximum allowable incomes for inclusionary units ranges from $51,050 for a one-person household to $80,013 for a family of eight, said Michelle Allen, a city planning official.

A review found that inclusionary housing had produced 364 units and $9.05 million in cash-in-lieu in Boulder as of 2008.

Most of those have been built on one side of town, Allen said, and Boulder's schools don't have a problem with clusters of low-income students, so she thought the affect on the schools had been negligible.

Madison, Wis., had an inclusionary zoning law from 2004 to 2008, when its council let it expire, said Brian Ohm, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who helped create the law.

It was not in effect long enough to influence the school system, but school officials supported it as a way to diversify schools, he said.

Working in Chapel Hill

An affordable housing policy in Chapel Hill, N.C., has helped area schools, according to a school official there.

In 2000, the city said it expected applicants with rezoning requests to make 15 percent of the units affordable to low-to-moderate income people, or pay fees or propose other measures.

The policy has yielded more than 300 housing units and more than $3 million of in-lieu payments, said Loryn Clark of the town's planning department. Chapel Hill's council is currently considering an inclusionary zoning law.

Stephanie Knott, a spokeswoman for Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools, said the current policy has been good for education.

“These sorts of things help ensure diversity in our classrooms and allow us to work on what are sometimes called 21st-century skills - the opportunity to interact and get along with people who are different from us in some way and to learn about other cultures,” she said.

That's a similar goal some residents of the Iowa City school district have.

The percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch this year ranges from 2.85 percent to 69.17 percent at the district's 24 schools. The two elementary schools with the highest percentages, Twain and Wood, are on the southeast side of town, where most people recognize there is a concentration of low-income housing.

The redistricting consultant, RSP and Associates, drew up a boundary scenario that addressed that imbalance, but it relied on busing some students long distances, which was not well-received by the community.

The school board later said keeping neighborhood schools was a higher priority than student demographics, and the scenarios the board is considering don't make big changes to the free-reduced lunch rates.

Some members of the redistricting committee said they thought the issue would have to be addressed elsewhere, including through zoning.

Superintendent Lane Plugge said he believed an inclusionary zoning policy could benefit the district.

“I think it has the potential to help,” he said. “It's not the only answer, but it does.”

Zoning has issues, too

Inclusionary zoning is not without its critics.

In Madison, the law ran into two problems, the University of Wisconsin's Ohm said.

First, a court struck down the portion of the ordinance that dealt with rental housing, saying it ran counter to the state's rent-control law.

Second, the city didn't want people to take advantage of the subsidies developers received and sell the inclusionary homes after a short time at a huge profit, so it limited how much they could be resold for, Ohm said.

The problem was, buyers didn't want that restriction, and there already were some lower priced units in the city that the free market created, so they bought the homes that weren't under the ordinance, he said.

Such policies are why some opponents say inclusionary zoning goes against free-market principles. Homebuilders tend to object to the practice on the grounds that it will cost them money. The National Association of Home Builders says it is not effective at addressing affordable housing.

Local homebuilders are keeping mum on the issue. Joan Tiemeyer, executive officer of the Greater Iowa City Area Home Builders Association, said her organization is working with the City Council to find alternatives to inclusionary zoning but would not say what those may be.

She would not answer when asked if developers would avoid building in Iowa City, if the city was alone in adopting inclusionary zoning.

Glenn Siders, a vice president with Southgate Development, also declined to comment, even though he's a member of the Johnson County Council of Governments' affordable housing committee.

According to unapproved minutes from a meeting in April, Siders said the building industry is often asked to bear the financial burden in providing affordable housing, and developers would need subsidies to build affordable housing without becoming insolvent.

The UI's Anthony and Jeff Davidson, Iowa City's director of planning and community development, said time has shown that the private sector, in general, will not voluntarily build a range of homes in their developments.

“There are developers who will fight tooth and nail to keep their subdivisions with a single housing type - typically single-family - because they feel like it makes it easier for them to sell those units,” Davidson said.