Zoning Strategies and Tools to Unlock Housing Supply Across the Midwest Transcript

KAREN CUENCA: Hi, everybody. Before we begin, I want to state the disclaimer that the views expressed in today's webinar reflect my own and those of the presenters and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or of the Federal Reserve System. My name is Karen Cuenca, and I want to welcome you all to the webinar, Zoning Strategies and Tools to Unlock Housing Supply Across the Midwest.

Congress gives the Federal Reserve a dual mandate to stabilize prices and maximize employment. In creating the Federal Reserve System, Congress established 12 regional banks that each serve a specific geographic area known as a Federal Reserve district. The Chicago Fed serves the Seventh District, which is all of Iowa and most of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

As part of our commitment to advance the dual mandate, I work with colleagues to connect with people across the Seventh District to talk about the economy. As part of this engagement work, we hear a lot about housing affordability and how it affects both the cost of living and the job market.

In both urban and rural communities, we hear that high and rising housing costs mean that many renters are cost burdened. First-time homebuyers find it difficult to break into the housing market. And employers sometimes can't successfully attract workers because workers can't find accessible housing where jobs are located. We also hear that in many communities, there is a mismatch between the type of housing available in the community and the type of housing that residents, workers, and employers want.

As we've worked to understand the issue, many of our contacts emphasize that zoning plays a key role in determining the types of housing available in a community and where that housing is located. Through zoning codes and regulations, communities guide long-term growth and development based on their priorities and their vision for the future.

Today, we're taking a deeper dive into the zoning tools that are available to communities and how communities are developing zoning strategies to unlock housing supply. While we understand that zoning policies and housing goals and challenges look different for every community, we also hear that communities are eager to learn from each other about different ways that they can address common challenges.

With that in mind, we are joined here today by two panelists who are engaged in zoning efforts in their communities in Michigan and Indiana. First, we have Leah DuMouchel, director of programs and communications at the Michigan Association of Planning, otherwise known as MAP. Leah will speak to the tools that MAP has developed for communities in Michigan, thinking about rezoning.

Our second speaker will be Tim Corcoran, director of planning for the city of South Bend, Indiana. Tim will speak to the strategies that municipalities can undertake when it comes to zoning efforts. After the presentations, I will moderate a Q&A session among the panelists. But first, we'll be starting with Leah's presentation.

LEAH DUMOCHEL: Thank you. I'm going to share here. Can everyone see my screen, as I think they should, Karen? Yeah. OK, great. Perfect. So we'll start here, Zoning Strategies and Tools to Unlock Housing Supply Across The Upper Midwest. There are some images here of some Corktown brownstones in our beautiful Detroit, some of the existing missing middle housing that we have here.

My name is Leah DuMouchel. I'm the director of programs and communications here at the Michigan Association of Planning. We are the state chapter of the American Planning Association for 5013c. Our mission is to provide information, education, and advocacy to our more than 4,000 members, which we've been doing for more than 75 years.

About a third of us are professional planners like me, and then the other 2/3 are from positions that we need to make good housing and land use decisions, so planning commissioners, elected officials, other friends of planning and related fields, including housers, maybe your field.

Housing is a core planning issue. And MAP has taken our responsibility for helping to address our corner of the housing crisis, the regulatory burden, lumber, labor, land, and laws. We can't fix them all, but the laws part of it has our name right on it. So our board identified housing as its top policy priority for three years in a row, from 2020 to 2022. And our organization has been working on implementation strategies, education, and projects ever since.

So here's a few examples here. We've held trainings. We've focused on the issue in our magazine. We've been closely involved with our state legislature, and we've produced a few major projects, which I'm going to share with you today. And that's been a major focus of my work here at the organization.

So first, some Michigan context that really put some numbers to the landscape that Karen just laid out. Why are we at MAP investing so heavily in this? Why are we all so interested in this that we're here on this webinar, right?

So this first graph is one that I present all the time. It keeps me up at night. I feel like it's really the key to understanding the whole housing situation that we're in. And it feels like it's simple but not easy. So housing values, which are on the top line in blue, are just changing according to a different formula than wages, which are the bottom line in green. So this graph goes back to about 1980.

And yet the outcomes are supposed to be proportional at all times. Housing costs should be at all times 30% of wages. And so anyone who managed to make it out of Algebra 1 knows that if you're changing according to two different formulas, this just doesn't math. And we've gotten to the point of unsustainability now.

So what we're doing, all of us, in general, right now, is trying to subsidize our way out of the problem. So every housing project you hear about or participate in is publicly supported, usually by multiple means, a capital stack. Or it's for people who are at the very top of the income spectrum.

And one of the educational webinars that we hosted about a tax increment finance project program for housing that our state rolled out last year, I learned that in our state a market rate project only pencils at about 120% of the area median income. So if the market doesn't include the median income, we can literally only build housing for the top tier of earners without using public dollars. And you might have guessed, there are just not enough public dollars to meet that housing need.

So this graph shows Michigan housing permits since 1960. Single-family units are in blue on the top. Duplexes to quadplexes, our missing middle, are in yellow on the bottom. And structures with five or more units are in the middle in green.

And you can see that our shortfall really originated or picked up steam back in 2006 when we kicked off the Great Recession. We've never recovered our rate of building housing. But even before that, we can see that since about 1990, we built housing very differently than we are right now. We once built much more multifamily housing. You can see in the '70s, that rate was keeping pace with single-family housing.

And you can also see that we built a lot more of those gentle density formats, the duplexes, the quads, the kind that really can fit in almost any neighborhood. Those have been of gradually squashed over time, but they did exist, and they can again.

Statewide, our households have been shrinking. But our housing structures have been growing. So at this point, there is an exact mismatch between housing with three or more bedrooms and housing with three or more people, which, of course, is not to say that there are no one or two-person households who want to live in a three or more bedroom home. Some certainly do. But it does suggest that there's at least some of those one or two-person households that might be forced into a bigger unit than they want and most certainly than they can afford, simply because that's what's available.

And then this is a gap, as I said, because households continue to shrink. Housing continues to grow. This gap is continuing to widen.

I find this slide here especially galling here in Michigan. You might feel the same way across the Midwest. We as a state have worked so hard on economic development over the past-- I mean, I've lived here my whole life. So I'm going to call it 40-plus years. We've invested in tax breaks and recruited and donated land and paid for infrastructure because the jobs, the jobs, the jobs.

And now it's all paying off. But we can hardly ride the momentum because it seems that we didn't plan for housing alongside the jobs. And now we can't fill the jobs because we don't have anywhere for the people to live. And I have heard this not just from the wider scale but in every individual size and community that I've talked to in the state, to say nothing about the big, splashy statewide economic development deals that we have made, all of which are struggling for this reason. This is some component of it being difficult right now. And I have found that this is one of the more motivating factors in convincing communities to think about zoning reform.

So what have we been doing about all this? Our state housing authority adopted its very first statewide housing plan in 2022, which was a couple of years into our housing work. This plan identified a number and type of housing units needed, which has been really helpful in moving conversations forward. What we planners noticed right away is that most of these housing types are the kind that are the hardest to get built.

They're subsidized. They're attached. They're rental. They're small. They're on small lots. In any given community, it's hard to get a hundred of these units. So any planner looked at this and said, oh, great, where exactly are 75,000 of these units going to go in our state?

So to implement this plan, the housing authority developed a regional housing partnership program. And that broke the state down into 15 geographic regions. And for the last two years, MSDHA, the housing authority has provided funding to get all the housing stakeholders in each region together to move the needle on their housing needs. And the state authority has been pretty hands off about how that's accomplished. Other than the funding, they did ask for each group to set their own goals and establish indicators to measure progress toward them, which zoning is identified in nearly each of those action plans as a barrier.

So MAP, our organization, has worked with various regions in different ways. And in my home region, I sit regularly on the committee. We did a planning and zoning analysis project with one of our regions. We're helping several of the regions understand their zoning status quo through our Michigan zoning map project that I'll talk about later. So this is the state's investment in it.

The most used tool that MAP has provided to communities in our state is our Zoning Reform Toolkit. So this is available in PDF form for free on our website. The link is right there. It's also available in print. We just make it available at cost. And it's a really thoughtful presentation of 15 zoning changes that any community could start on today to ease regulation and housing. And that was what we wanted.

Statewide efforts are great, and they're one thing. But we're pretty locally controlled here in Michigan. And so we wanted to make sure that tools were available in communities' own hands. So rather than just have a list, we worked hard in this guide to set the stage for the tools in general and for each one of them. So it really goes beyond the list to an exploration of how we could do business as usual differently.

There's three buckets that the tools fall into. The first one is exactly what you might think of, allowing more housing units and residential districts and allowing housing at all in non-residential districts, especially commercial districts in downtowns.

But perhaps surprisingly or maybe not surprisingly, it turned out that we can do just as much damage to housing affordability with our dimensional standards as we can with our uses. So requiring that area, requiring minimum dwelling unit sizes, large setbacks, requiring parking, those all have a direct cost in terms of land building implementation. And so removing or reducing those requirements all can have a direct impact on affordability.

And then our processes have time and complexity costs that do show up in the price of a housing unit as well. So the more that these can be streamlined, the less these costs are passed on to the buyer, so reducing the processes where we can, making things administrative where we can. I want to point out that our pre-approved plans, one of our local leaders in the state, Kalamazoo, followed South Bend's example closely when they were developing that program. So I'm excited to maybe hear a little bit more about that.

So after we finished our toolkit, we rolled it out, particularly to our members. And we asked. We said, OK, this is a great resource. But what do you need to actually implement these tools and to take them to your community, actually get something adopted, really reform your zoning?

And we heard the same thing all over. Best practices are important. This guide is great. But my community is going to want to know who has done this and how did it go. Well, we're a membership organization. We're the state's planning organization. We said, hey, we're in a good position to supply that. And that is what we did with our zoning reform stories and studies, which, same deal, is available in PDF for free on our website at the same link there. We can send you a print copy at cost.

So our survey of more than a hundred of the municipalities in Michigan showed us that the most used tools at that time-- we're going to do the survey again. This was in 2023-- where text changes to the district so that those zone district changes, allowing housing in the commercial districts, allowing more housing types in the residential districts.

And I also, for the second part of it, sat down with more than 20 planning decision makers in independent communities and had in-depth conversations about how implementing housing is going in their communities. And we asked about what housing was being built, what the master plan said about it, what data was convincing, what the public conversation was like, what zoning changes we were planning for, what else it's taken.

And we selected these stories so that a community of any size, type, or region of our state would have an example to look to and maybe even an ally to talk to. It's a pretty small community in planning, and we really are looking for ways to help ourselves help each other.

And then the last tool that I really want to tell you about is our Michigan Zoning Map. This is a new tool that displays how zoning regulations affect housing supply. And it does that across more than one jurisdiction. We've been working on a per county basis. So we get a county's worth of view at a time.

If you've heard of the National Zoning Atlas, that's where our work started. That's the basic idea of what we're doing. And now we're building an independent tool that's Michigan specific so that we can use that data in a more robust way. So basically, we read every zoning code. We record the answer to about 100 questions about how that district treats housing and then use mapping software to show what those results are on a map and to do some analysis about the aggregated findings.

In the six or so of our 83 counties that we've mapped so far, we've found really pretty consistent constraints on housing supply. The vast majority of residential land only allows really expensive housing types, single-family detached, often on large lots. And a shockingly small percentage allows any smaller or attached housing types at all. It ranges between 2% and 5% of residential land.

This is new information that none of us really had before. You could look at one zoning code, but not at a whole county's worth, and understand the content constraints. And it can be a really compelling way to encourage a community to think more deeply about how they allow housing and to have that conversation with their neighbors and the region in mind.

So I'm going to wrap up by giving you a quick example here. Kent County is the home of our second largest city, Grand Rapids. It's also one of the fastest growing areas of the state. So there is economic and development pressure there. Things are going to happen there. It was a county that we analyzed in the pilot round of our zoning map. And we did that project with a lead in the regional housing partnership, one of those 15 geographic areas for that area.

And so that partnership then integrated the information with other resources that they use to advocate for more housing. So they had a countywide needs assessment, and they knew that they needed 35,000 more housing units by 2027 and about 70,000 more housing units by 2050, again, to accommodate the existing and projected economic activity, which we've been working so hard for.

So they asked the question, under the status quo, how and where is that existing need going to be met? So because this partner organization is really focused on grounding their recommendations in known facts and constraints and really how are we going to get this done, they had good information about the cost to construct new housing in the area and also the relationship between that and median incomes.

So according to their work, about 23% of households earn enough money that they could support the cost of constructing a new single-family home. About another third of the county could support smaller and denser new construction if it were permitted. And just under half of the household incomes don't support new construction at this time. This is the pool that will be selecting from the existing housing stock, which, of course, is there.

But on the land available for new construction, which is largely currently vacant land-- redevelopment happens, but a lot of the housing need is met on currently vacant land. Almost 98% of it, 98%, is zoned exclusively for single-family use. And then what's more is that on that land, the average lot size requirement is almost two acres. So we legally require essentially all-new construction. If it were to start today, we're ready to build a home. It would need to be of the most expensive type legally.

And because we can see that doesn't match either the existing or the incoming residents' financial reality, we can really show that there's a legal constraint to meeting the demonstrated housing need in a way that makes financial sense. Maybe the most compelling aspect of this analysis is the illustration of where these units are going to get built. So the map on the left here is Kent County, and it shows us all the vacant parcels in the county that will allow housing to be built.

So we can see that according to the current rules, we're going to need all of them to house the 70,000 new households that are coming to the county in the next couple of decades. And if we do it that way, according to the way we legally have to right now, what that will mean is in all of Kent County, no more green space, no more farmland, no more agriculture, no more preservation.

So as a thought exercise, our partners show that we can meet the same housing demand and actually a tiny fraction of the land with-- and this is a really critical part-- an even tinier fraction of the infrastructure investment, by ensuring that we're using existing underutilized space and infrastructure. So if we locate a significant portion of those existing underutilized corridors, then the overall density that's needed to get to those 70,000 units is about 18 dwelling units per acre, rather than the one dwelling unit per two acres that's currently legally required.

And I have a little illustration. So that 18 dwelling units per acre is about the density of what you would think of as an attached townhome. So this is an example of the kind of new thinking that we're able to get to, the kind of ability to get over the hump of we seem to be fine-- it's working now-- that often kind of stalls us in our conversations-- and get to some new understanding of the collective constraints that zoning applies to housing so that we have a better incentive to change them.

It's not technically difficult to change a zoning ordinance. The difficult thing is getting the will to want to. And so that's what these tools are really sort of-- their dual purpose is making it easier technically but also such that we want to. So that is it for me. And I'm looking forward to answering some questions later. I will turn it over now to Tim Corcoran from South Bend.

TIM CORCORAN: All right. Thank you, Leah. Let me share my screen. Let's make sure this is working. Can you see my screen, Karen?

KAREN CUENCA: Yes, we can.

TIM CORCORAN: Great. Well, thank you very much for having me here today to talk a little bit about the things we've accomplished in South Bend. And there may be some strategies and tools that you might want to adopt in your community. So I love Leah's approach, the big picture context that she provided all of the-- I'm sure much of the data that she presented at the beginning of her presentation are very similar for Northern Indiana as well.

But my talk here is a little bit more about how we've gotten some of those changes done that Leah talked about from a state-level analysis. So first thing is just a little context about South Bend. This is South Bend in 1890. We're on the South Bend of the Saint Joe River for those who didn't know. And that's how we get our name. We're very creative people.

We have a great city of regular streets, blocks, great walkable neighborhoods. And in the early or late 1800s, early 1900s, we had some of the most innovative companies in the United States all moving to South Bend to take advantage of the power from the river.

And we grew in South Bend. Downtown was an intact, solid, great environment. And our population continued to increase pretty rapidly really up until the early 1960s until the macroeconomic issues that affected a lot of places across the Midwest, the decline of manufacturing, in this case, the Studebaker automotive factory here in South Bend, the rise of suburban development patterns that really started to pull people out of our core neighborhoods and a lot of disinvestment that happened because of that.

And as a consequence of those things and others that are more local, we start to decline. And really, in 2010, we had lost close to 30,000 people from our peak population in the '60s. And just to focus on one particular neighborhood, this is a neighborhood called Lincoln Park.

Pre 1960, it had 237 houses. In 1986, some had been demolished. There was still 205 houses and 38 vacant lots. But by 2023, we had only 97 houses remaining in this neighborhood with 140 vacant lots. And so this is what has become our number one priority for South Bend. It is really healing our neighborhoods with quality mixed income infill development.

And in that process, we have over 600 city-owned lots to do that. In 2011, Newsweek called South Bend one of America's most dying cities and saying, "casting doubt on whether we'd ever be able to recover from where we had been."

And so I think one of the most important things. And it's something that I truly believe each community who is really looking to address this issue-- it first starts with a mindset shift, potentially, one that really thinks about a growth mindset rather than, I think, what had been of a decline mindset or a cautious mindset that had been kind of permeated through South Bend for decades after certainly the Studebaker closing.

And that mindset is very important for decision makers to have because, as Leah mentioned, the zoning ordinance is the easiest thing to fix. It doesn't take very much money or time to do, but it does take a lot of political will. And that political will is grounded in a growth or abundance mindset.

So we're facing big macroeconomic challenges. We all know about the housing supply not keeping up, demographic changes, cost of construction and labor. And a lot of these maybe require some national solutions. But in South Bend, we also have some other things that we're trying to address that we think can have local solutions but are still national issues that communities face.

One of the big ones for us is tackling what I call suburban bias. And this bias is almost baked into the way we think about what is a quality community, what our future in housing looks like. But it doesn't really understand the fiscal implications of urban and suburban development patterns.

And you also have to look into seeing is your code biased against urban outcomes. Regulatory brain damage-- one of the things that we really try to reduce here in South Bend is really focusing on things and regulating the things that really matter to our community. Can we legally rebuild South Bend the way it was when we were in a growth trajectory?

We also like to take a proactive approach to development and really try to lead that development and be partners and driving those outcomes. We want to make the process as easy to understand as possible, not only for people who are looking to develop in our community, but also for our own staff and how they have to manage those codes.

In many neighborhoods in South Bend, we have a very large appraisal gap between the cost of new construction and what that home will appraise for right away. And so understanding and repairing a broken housing market, looking at city investments and land control, thinking about creative financing and very importantly, building partnerships to help deliver new housing--

The map that you see here was created by a company called Urban3 from Asheville, North Carolina. And this map is every parcel in Saint Joe County and ranked by low value to high value. Green is low value. Reds and purples are high value parcels. And this is just the assessed value of these parcels.

And the thing to note about this particular map, in my opinion, is that it doesn't really tell you anything. It's a very scattershot spreading of value across the county. But I know, because I live here, that most of Saint Joe County is farmland, that there are two major cities, and that there are small towns and villages that are scattered throughout that farmland that don't really pop out from this map.

But when you look at it in a per acre value, assessed value per acre, you can really start to see where South Bend, where Mishawaka is, and where some of the smaller towns in our county are located and that the dark green is the farmland in between.

And so this map makes sense to me. And when you take this map and you project those values off the chart or off the map, you can really start to see where the value in your community is being generated. And each one of these little spikes represents a parcel, represents a building. And you can then go and look at those spikes to find out what are the building typologies that are providing value in your community.

And so you can take that, and you can break it down by an ROI by building typology. And what we find is in South Bend, a single-family home typically will lose the city money year to year, whereas just pushing into that medium density townhome style development is starting to be financially productive for the city.

Now, it doesn't mean that we won't do single family. We absolutely will be looking at building single family, but it means that we need to broaden our perspective about what we want to enable in our community and how we want to see our city change. And the math is very important because I think it does resonate well with decision makers and others who may have some of that suburban bias built in and then starting to realize, well, if we want a vibrant community, if we want to meet those housing needs that Leah and others talk about, we have to really broaden our perspective.

And in South Bend, both out of necessity and out of maybe some wisdom, is that we take an incremental approach to practically everything that we do. We are not a wealthy community. We don't have all the money to fundamentally change a neighborhood all at once or do a pre-approved plan project and/or change our zoning ordinance. Anything that you can do incrementally, I advocate for that approach.

And one of the things that we first started doing is picking up vacant parcels. And over the last 10 years, we've picked up over 600 vacant parcels. These are properties that were acquired or acquired through our county tax sale.

And we started in targeted areas where we were looking to build off some local neighborhood strength in these areas. So if there was a strong neighborhood association or a CDC that was really involved in a particular neighborhood or had some locational advantages, we started to focus in on those areas.

And land control is a huge part of what we know is one of the base things to successful outcomes. If you don't control the land, it makes getting the outcomes that your community needs more difficult, not impossible. But if you own the land, you can set up the future for those properties.

So we went through an extensive design testing and code audit of our previous zoning ordinance. And we like to draw things here in South Bend. And what's really nice about this particular picture is that we have planners from both the city and the county, the consultant who's in the room. We have a council member who is very interested in zoning and in housing. And we even have some members of local CDCs who were looking to expand what they were doing in neighborhoods and wanting to learn how to be able to build more in their neighborhoods.

Part of this was what we call a code stress test. And this is where we're actually drawing missing middle housing typologies and smaller houses to see where the existing code at the time-- where it wouldn't allow for that to happen-- and then really documenting those moments in the code that were preventing more dense and a more variety of housing typologies to happen by right.

And we also reviewed a lot of commonly requested and grant variances like off-street parking minimums, landscaping, buffering, clear sight areas and corners. And so we did all this and drew all this. And it's a really great exercise to find out where your code is broken.

And so one of those examples-- and this is a story about my first day at work where this retail shop was wanting-- it had been abandoned for a long time, and it needed a rezoning. And there was a residential unit behind it.

And the current zoning administrator said, well, if you want to do that, we got to bring it up to standard. And so we have to add this buffer yard, and that includes a three-foot hedgerow. And there's two trees for every 25 feet. And now we've run out of parking spaces. So you need to acquire the land next door. And so you need more parking.

And I was just like, why? Why would we do this? This is a business that had been successful in the past. Why can't we make this easier for people to do?

And our code really didn't look at the fiscal impacts at all, so some of that value per acre analysis that I showed earlier. Our existing code at the time was extremely difficult to navigate and interpret, and it was not calibrated at all to South Bend conditions. The conditions that made South Bend a successful community in the 1800s and the early 1900s and into the 1960s, a lot of that was made illegal in our previous code. And so we wanted to calibrate it to make it legal again.

And so we did-- like I said, we're focused very heavily on infill development. And so we were looking at lot typologies. And what are the lots that are most common in South Bend? And how can you combine those things to add more density, that density, that missing middle typologies and small-scale multifamily and integrate them into neighborhoods in different ways that we've done in the past in South Bend-- and using South Bend examples to show people that cottage courts and fourplexes and some six and eighplexes, they're not scary. They're already in your neighborhood. And there's great reasons to do that again.

One of the things that we really also focused on and somewhat stumbled into a little bit was the process in which we updated our zoning code. We didn't want to take an all-in-one approach to doing this, like a complete code rewrite. There's a lot of risks to that. And I was quite worried about stories that I had heard about other communities across the US and challenges that they had and the time and the money and effort that it took to do a complete code rewrite.

So instead of doing that, we decided to do something that we called quick fixes, which is kind of a funny name because we quick fixed many things over three years, so not quick at all. But maybe in zoning terms it was. And a quick fix is really incremental changes to what was our existing ordinance.

And we started with those technical changes and cutting red tape, things that people either didn't care about, or everybody can get behind cutting red tape and making things easier for people to do. These are the variances that we'd always grant. For instance, why make someone go through the BZA process when they were going to get the variance anyway?

And we were able then to, over multiple quick fixes, add more complexity and innovation over time. So for instance, we were able then to add a missing middle housing district and look at some other things that I'll get into. And we did this over 14 separate votes and 25 public meetings.

And what it allowed for was that, when we would bring one package of quick fixes, if people were really interested in it, it allowed for focused public feedback on just those quick fixes. And if those were OK and they were adopted, then great. Your zoning code is now incrementally better than it was before.

But when you do come to something that might be more challenging, more politically challenging to deliver, you can take more time with that. And those issues will not stop the greater impacts that you're making on other incremental fixes that you're making. So issues one contentious issue cannot stop the whole process.

And what was great, this really built a lot of trust with our city council for further changes. They saw the process they were going through, they were involved in it. And by the end, the questions kind of dissipated a lot. I think that trust was really important.

And we were really conscious about starting this process with enough time with our current council before council elections that we didn't have to re-educate a new group of council members and go through this process again. And so it was important for us to get all this work done and within that one election cycle.

It also allows for ordinance testing and continuous improvement. We don't want our current ordinance to be static any longer, like it had been in the past. We want to continuously fix it where things are broken and where the market is changing so that we can deliver great outcomes.

So quick fix is three years later. We had basically achieved almost complete zoning reform in South Bend, where we had created a new district to enable missing middle. We had permitted accessory dwelling units by right on every parcel in South Bend.

We reduced setbacks and minimum lot sizes. We eliminated off street parking requirements, limited cul-de-sac maximum lengths. We cut over 250 pages from our previous ordinance. We reduced the number of land uses from 460 to 66. And we made the document much easier to read and administer. I don't want to administer a broken code or one that I can't understand any more than anyone wants to comply with it.

And I think most importantly is we were able to eliminate a lot of the suburban-biased codes and regulations in that code to allow for South Bend to heal itself in the same way that it had grown. And so this is an example of what our code used to look like. And this is what our code looks like now.

We simplified the language in it. I'm not even going to read what it used to say. But corner set back, 15 feet, everybody can understand that.

And within the code, we created little mini codes for each district so that you could go straight to one part of the code based on where you were in the city and what district you were in and really get a clear understanding of the intent, what building types were allowed, and then a step-by-step guide as to how to place and locate buildings on those properties.

And our code is kind of a hybrid form-based code. It's form based for our urban districts and more Euclidean for our suburban districts. And what was great is we were recognized for our innovative zoning policy. But the key question is, what does that mean? And initially, that didn't mean a lot.

Just because you change your zoning code doesn't mean that people will come flocking to your community and start bulldozing houses and putting up fourplexes. And so we had to really start to investigate things on a deeper level.

And so we realized we had to do a lot of things to help support new development in our community. And one of the first ways we did that was through neighborhood planning and engaging residents. And we were doing a lot of these neighborhood plans sort of simultaneously with the zoning code update. And so we could socialize ideas about missing middle housing and gentle density with residents so that we could take what was a zoning map that has predominantly single-family zoning in the tan, beige areas and upzone the neighborhood into the browns areas that allow for, in this case, four units and an accessory dwelling unit, so five units per parcel.

But who's going to build and do a lot of the infill in these neighborhoods that have been damaged for so many decades? No one had been knocking on our door to get these parcels, these 600 parcels that I mentioned, from us.

And so we realized that, as part of this, we really had to start to maybe create and help and build a local small-scale developer community. And so one of the things that we did here is we worked with different organizations to help generate ideas and get people who are already interested in healing their neighborhoods to come to networking events and learn about the fundamentals of neighborhood development.

So the city sponsors these networking events, I think, quarterly or at least bi-annually, where we bring city officials, the zoning department. We bring representatives from local banks, other small-scale developers, who can learn from each other, and put them in a room. And people get to talk to each other and talk about their ideas and what they're doing.

And it all started with a group called the Incremental Development Alliance. They ran a series of developer bootcamps in South Bend. And this really will bring people out from your community out to understand what they might be able to do for their neighborhoods. But you might bring a lot of people out. But only a few of those people will graduate. And I mean by graduate that they have a project in mind.

And this is another group that we've used called Neighborhood Evolution. And they do one-on-one developer coaching and to help people go create pro formas and understand design and subdivision and really help skill up people who, in our case, have become small-scale developers in our community.

One of the important things, though, is that while there's a lot of really well-meaning people in South Bend who really want to do great things-- and I'm sure there's well-meaning people across the country who are really trying to make their community better places-- that we had to raise expectations to a certain degree about what could be done in certain places.

And one of the things that we found was that, when we were creating partnerships to build new infill housing, that oftentimes they had something like this house in mind. And there's nothing wrong with this house, but it is a very suburban house, one that you typically find on the edge of our community.

But what was happening is that they see this as being the good house, the desirable house, the one that people want to live in. But it was not the way South Bend was built. And so this is, again, where this suburban bias starts to trickle into our consciousness and how we think about revitalizing our neighborhoods.

And so we started talking to each other and said-- it sounded like we had a lot of the objectives in terms of what we were trying to accomplish in this particular infill project of just five modest houses. And they came back with this. And I was like, this doesn't really fit into the neighborhood. And the city's participating financially in this project. And I'm like, what in the world is this turret?

And what we realized was that a lot of people were thinking that they were custom home builders and that they had clients that they were trying to deliver a product to when in reality, what we need is people who are thinking more like production home builders. And it was really this conversation that began our journey of creating our pre-approved house plans because this is what South Bend looks like. And this is how South Bend was built.

And so this becomes the genesis of our neighborhood infill and our pre-approved, ready-to-build housing project, where we are, again, talking about-- where we were talking to neighbors about infill development and missing middle housing typologies and general density in their neighborhood and showing how these things can take place in their neighborhood next to existing homes, next to single-family homes, and how they can all play a role in the resiliency of a neighborhood.

And so these are the first five pre-approved plans that the city developed, and they were very intentional in why we selected them. We had a list of maybe 20 to even 30 house types and building types that we were interested in that we would think is pretty cool.

But you have to start small. And so we started with an ADU because we had just permitted them or made them legal by right across the city. So we thought, hey, why don't we do a plan for people to be able to build ADUs? And so that was that. That's how we started with that one.

The narrow house or the next one in was one where a lot of folks thought that they can't build on 30-foot wide lots. And in South Bend, we have a lot of 30 to 34-foot wide lots that are already platted. And so we wanted to do a design that could address that need. We have a standard house just because that's something that people want and is desirable.

The next one is a stacked duplex and a sixplex, which we thought might have been a fourplex when we first started the process. But we did pro formas-- and very detailed pro formas for each of these building typologies-- and found that a fourplex just didn't pencil out very well in South Bend due to the fire suppression systems and other things in the building code that made that a little bit more expensive. So when we got to six, it started to make a little bit more financial sense.

And each of these plan sets have different facade types. And behind the catalog are very detailed plan sets that even go into showing eave details and other things that we think are important in providing the character and quality of the homes that we want to see in many of these neighborhoods.

And what we really care about in the pre-approved plans is the envelope of the house. And if somebody wants to move some walls internally, we're OK with that. We really want that exterior that creates the quality streetscapes and the quality blocks and really makes the neighborhood a more desirable place to live.

So now we have the pre-approved house plans, and we have small-scale developers that are looking to do these things, only to find out that our infrastructure costs are exorbitant and very expensive to reconnect your sewer and water laterals back to these vacant lots. South Bend has been around for a while. And some of our infrastructure is very old and very deep underground.

And so we realized that we needed to do something about the infrastructure to reconnect these vacant lots. And so we created a lateral connection grant that provides up to $20,000 per unit to reconnect to our sewer main. And so that's been very helpful in making housing a little bit more affordable.

We're always looking at ways that we can try to incrementally reduce the cost of housing. The pre-approved plans may only take $10,000 or so off the soft cost of a new house. And this is another $20,000 or so that can help with that. So each one of these things, we see it, again, as an incremental approach to affordability as well and what sorts of programs and things that we can do to help that.

But as Leah mentioned, you can't really do this without partnerships and without subsidy. And these are nine projects that are happening in South Bend right now, a variety of different groups that are working here. Some are local CDCs. Others are larger that are more statewide. And some are local developers.

But each one of these has a developer agreement with them to build a certain number of units. Sometimes they're market rate. Sometimes they have affordability requirements. There's the whole broad brush stroke of housing that we're looking to deliver here in South Bend. And so each agreement is a little bit different.

But total, what it means is that we are in the process of building 223 new units in South Bend. These are all in infill conditions, in neighborhoods that no one has touched in over 60 years. So 223 units that are either built under construction, permitted, and approximately 110 of those will be pre-approved.

We've invested over $11.1 million into that, but it's bringing that cost per unit down to about $50,000 a unit. That doesn't include some of the land that we had. But without that land, we couldn't make this possible. Some were federal funds. And there could be a tax abatement associated with it as well.

And so some of the results, these are the first two pre-approved house plans. The one on the right is the first one. And the one on the left is the second one, two different versions of the narrow house. This is the first lot that one of the small-scale developers said, you can't build on a 30-foot lot. And they've shown that they can build on a 30 foot lot, and they're nice houses.

This is an example of our side-by-side duplex in the brown. And the red one is a stacked duplex. And this stacked duplex is actually built to near net zero construction. And it won the Home Builders Association Best Floor Plan and Curb Appeal and Kitchen in 2024 and got a lot of interest from home builders and residents about ways that they can, again, have a modest but contextual, beautiful home that could also be a rental property, part of it as well.

This is our standard house. But beyond pre-approved, we have other side-by-side duplexes that are being built in South Bend. These are things that are made more possible through our zoning code update and new townhouse construction. Accessory dwelling units, small houses, modern houses, tiny houses, these are also net zero, also won the Home Builders Association Award in 2023, I think, or 2022.

This is our first urban fourplex that's been built in South Bend in probably 100 years. It's complete. And one of the things that this sort of innovative housing typologies, like a cottage court-- this was a developer's dream, and it's starting to become a reality.

And these homes are actually duplexes. Upstairs is a small studio unit that are being rented to kids who have come through the foster care system. And they pair them with adults who live in an approximately 800-square-foot unit on the ground floor. And so these are the first two units of a seven-unit cottage court.

And those homes that you saw at the beginning of my slide deck here, they're complete. This is a Habitat for Humanity project that was right across the street from the first pre-approved house plans. And so the street is really coming together and looking great.

And that neighborhood that I talked about, Lincoln Park, where we had so many vacant lots, well, those partnerships are really important. And those partnerships lead to groundbreakings. And those groundbreakings lead to our first little house in this neighborhood, where-- here it is under construction. It is now complete. But this is the first of their first 20 that will happen on this street, concentrating that energy in one place to really transform the street.

But these are the first 20. But that agreement is for 92 houses. And so this neighborhood will fundamentally change within, at this point, four and a half years from now, maybe five years. And so seeing a lot of great, positive changes that happen when you do something like this. And so those 600 city-owned parcels that I mentioned at the beginning, we have now filled 300 of those parcels, either filled them, permitted, or committed them to a developer.

And some of the house permitting data that we have-- back in '07 and '09, we did 27 in that time frame. In 2023, we did 38 a year. But in 2025, we have 97 today. And that really is that growth mindset and that proactive approach that we take here in South Bend.

And so what had been a declining population is now on the uptick. And so we're really excited about the direction we're heading in our community. And happy to answer questions as well and see how you can replicate some of our success in your community.

KAREN CUENCA: Great. Thank you, Leah and Tim, for your presentations. So we're going to have a short Q&A. And we will be chatting about housing affordability, the role that zoning plays in shaping housing supply and communities, and things to keep in mind when it comes to developing zoning strategies.

So I'll address this question to Leah first, give Tim a little bit of a break. What are the long-term implications of not addressing housing affordability concerns in your region?

LEAH DUMOCHEL: Well, I'll speak to that really from my perspective of my adopted hometown of Ann Arbor, where I'm at, which honestly has made some efforts to address housing affordability but has not been able to keep up. So now we're in the middle of a master plan process. And so we've taken stock and seeing what's it's like around here.

And some of the long-term implications is we've really leaned on-- there's a growing distance between the jobs in your community and some of the people who can fill them, which becomes traffic. It becomes a transportation problem. It also becomes an economic development problem. It becomes an expansion problem for our local economies and businesses.

From my sort of personal perspective, I have a front row seat to some of the folks who either get pushed out or can't make it into the community. So I have a daughter of household formation age. We have no idea how she's going to manage to stay in the community that she's grown up in. She's got of fortunate situation right now, but the long-term outlook is like, there's no obvious path for the kids who have grown up here to stay here.

And that's true at the other end of the spectrum too. We age in place until we can't age in our homes anymore. And then if there's no place to go, we age right out of our community. We age away from our doctors. We age away from our post office. We age away from our hairdresser. And starting over late in life, trying to build a whole community, that's not a good health outcome. It's not good for anybody.

And then the last thing is that demographics change. So in our recent master plan process, we've learned that as our community has become less affordable, it has become older. It has become whiter. It has become just a smaller segment of the population than it was before. We pride ourselves on our diversity. We're the home of the University of Michigan. And the situation that we find ourselves in is not continuing to foster the values that we want to see in our community.

KAREN CUENCA: Tim, would you like to take that question?

TIM CORCORAN: Sorry. Can you repeat the question real quick?

KAREN CUENCA: What are the long-term implications of not addressing housing affordability concerns in your region--

TIM CORCORAN: Sure.

KAREN CUENCA: --in your community?

TIM CORCORAN: I think one of the most obvious things was, looking at our infill opportunities, those neighborhoods that have been so damaged, is that-- this is 50, 60 years of decline in some of these neighborhoods. And the point is that no one is coming to fix that decline.

So the long-term implication is that if the local community doesn't do something about it themselves and take a proactive approach, have that mindset that I talked about, it will not get done. That development will happen someplace else. It might happen on the edge of your community. It might happen in some other community. And what we all need and what employers are looking for is people.

And South Bend had more people. We want more people. We need more people. And those people need to live someplace. And the math has to work out as well that we can have a financially productive community but also have the affordability and the place for people to live. So it's an existential crisis if you don't deal with it.

Our problem is very obvious in many ways. And maybe it's just as hard, I think, in South Bend as it might be in Ann Arbor, where it's a wealthier community, but there's affordability. The affordability problem is still the same of problem. It's just, how do you tackle it? And there's different ways to address it.

KAREN CUENCA: Great. Thank you both for those responses. Up next, just a couple of questions about zoning and housing supply, and the first one focuses on housing costs. So it might not always be obvious to communities which zoning codes and regulations are impacting housing costs. How can communities zero in on those particular zoning and codes and regulations that are impacting housing costs?

TIM CORCORAN: Well, I think for us is understanding the financial math behind different building typologies. And so you have to understand that first. And once you understand where your community is financially productive and where it's not, then you can start to say, do we want to make our code more flexible and amenable to different housing typologies that, also, by the way, meet the demographic changes, meet the aging in place, things that we talked about as well?

And so I think you can start there. And then, that allows you to have a really good foundation for making those changes to your zoning code. I think people, like I said, respond a little bit better to math than they do to the fuzzy stuff that typically are the arguments that we might make in our communities and why we should do this so that our kids can live in our communities and so we can stay in our communities. So I think that's a great starting point.

LEAH DUMOCHEL: I agree with that. I think the financial part of it really is very compelling. And it goes beyond the zoning code. So that kind of speaks to the second two buckets in our zoning reform toolkit. We talked about the dimensional requirements, which might not be the first thing that you think of. But those have a dollar cost that you can really trace and illustrate.

Well, if construction costs is this much per square foot, and you require 1,000 square feet in your dwelling area-- sorry, in your dwelling unit-- then this is the amount of-- that regulation adds $20,000 in your area, in your community, for example, to every home that you build. Less visible maybe, though, are some of the process requirements that live in the zoning code. So anytime that something is not permitted by right-- it's a special land use. It has to have a public hearing-- it is approved by the elected body rather than the planning commission.

All of those things have a definite time cost that you can calculate. But then they also have an uncertainty cost that you, by definition, can't calculate. But it certainly goes into the developers thinking about where they're going to invest.

And at the very end, it absolutely shows up in the sales price of a home. That money just has to come from somewhere. And it 100% goes into the sales price. Nobody does this for free. And so that is less visible. But honestly, if I were looking for a place to start, I heard Tim say that one of the first places that they started was cutting red tape and technicalities. And that is one of the first places that I would go to too.

TIM CORCORAN: And, Leah, when you do that-- I mean, when you start to do that, go through that process and start cutting that red tape, becoming a more, say, pro housing community, people start to take notice. And so what became those first five houses that we worked on, now people are coming to us. And so where there would have been no interest in these neighborhoods, now there is interest.

And so we're actively looking to get more tax sale properties and more vacant properties in order to fill the demand. So I think there's that psyche, in a way, that you talked about, where if you don't know if it's going to be approved, or you might not take that project on-- if you've done the things to make your community a pro housing community, then I think people are wanting to take a bet on your community. And that risk is lower. And usually the cost is lower as well.

KAREN CUENCA: Great. Thank you. So this last set of questions will focus on zoning strategies. So as we heard from the presentations, zoning codes and regulations are not static. And they're regularly updated. And we've heard from Tim that there's an incremental approach that worked in South Bend.

How do communities make decisions about when it makes sense to fine tune versus maybe pursue larger-scale changes? Have you seen larger-scale changes in other communities, perhaps in Michigan? Or what else might you advise communities who are thinking about maybe the fine tuning approach versus larger-scale change?

TIM CORCORAN: Leah, you to start [INAUDIBLE]?

LEAH DUMOCHEL: Sure. I'll start. I appreciated everything that Tim said in his reasoning for taking the incremental approach. That really makes a lot of sense when it comes to housing because it is a conversation that puts a lot of people back on their heels and on guard.

And there can be a reactionary first out of the gate, no changes, please. That's what everybody kind of feels about their neighborhood and maybe about the neighborhood next to theirs and whatever. So there's a barrier to get over there. And the incremental approach helps to do that.

I think that it makes a certain amount of sense to maybe bundle a series of changes into a housing package. So then the opposite side of it, though, is if you make just one little change at a time, people can rightly ask the question, OK, but have we thought this through in the bigger picture? We're just changing one little thing here and there. And does this make sense in the wider sense of things?

So a package of reforms can shoot the gap there. So it warrants some planning study. If you're going to-- let's take on housing. You're going to spend some time really investing in understanding what the existing conditions are, what the barriers that your individual community is facing are-- and allows an opportunity to say, OK, we're going to tackle a half a dozen things. And they're going to touch these neighborhoods. And we're going to maybe go through them one at a time or understand them in pieces and have however many votes that we think that we think it takes.

So I'm not sure. I think it's the rare case where it's advisable to just throw the whole zoning code out the window and dramatically change how you address housing, all in one fell swoop. That's going to take a long time no matter what you do. And I really appreciated the line and Tim's slide about having one major issue have the ability to stop the entire project. That is a real risk when you're talking about housing.

So having maybe a package of reforms that make sense in investing the time and energy but also that it's broken up in such a way that it can be accomplished incrementally is an approach that I think is successful for a lot of communities.

TIM CORCORAN: I mean, we packaged multiple changes into each one of those. So it wasn't one little thing at a time. But I think the benefits that we didn't know, when we were doing it, is that trust building that happens because of the process. And that trust building with your council members is important.

I think one of the advantages, in a way, that South Bend had was that this pro housing approach that we were taking, it wasn't driven by me necessarily. It was that the, council, the mayor-- what do they hear every year? Why are the houses being demolished in my neighborhood? Why can't we get new houses built in our neighborhood?

And so I think there was a point that it took that at least on housing there was that pro growth mindset in which decision makers could be aligned in that way. Now, they may not be aligned in any other way. But fixing and healing these neighborhoods, I think everybody's aligned. And we know it from a math perspective. We know it from just the people who live there and how their lives can be affected by it.

And so I think having that base is really important. And it was an advantage, in some ways, for us because it did smooth the political side a little bit more than it might in a more NIMBY community, which I suspect Leah lives in, to some degree, and others like it where there's so much growth happening and so much investment happening that people start to want to put the brakes on that. And there's a lot of fear in it.

So I think we had a healthy fear, but one in which people we could get over that in order to see progress happen. And I think we're delivering on that. And so our challenge now is to continue to deliver that high quality product as well in these neighborhoods and keeping the developers and holding their feet to the fire to make sure that quality is there and those raised expectations so that the neighborhood doesn't fall back into a situation that it did in the past.

KAREN CUENCA: So second to last question here, so in the efforts to increase housing supply, how are communities rethinking the built environment and patterns or growth? Are community's rethinking maybe the mix of residential and commercial through zoning? Are you seeing other of zoning strategies emerging to increase housing supply in areas where they once did not?

KAREN CUENCA: If I could go first on that one, I think, for us, the rethinking has been in a way where the city has started to think about itself as a developer. And we're not fully there. And nor do I think we will ever be that.

But I think if you think of yourself as a developer-- and it does lead to that proactive approach that I talked about. So for us, in many ways, that attitude or going through that process has been very helpful in rethinking housing and housing supply in that our strategy in a way is like-- we know it's come and done it for us in the past. So we got to do it ourselves.

And so developing those partnerships has been our way of becoming that of quasi developer in our community and making those changes ourselves because, in many regards, no one else is going to do it for you.

LEAH DUMOCHEL: I'll answer that a little bit differently. I think that this involves what I'll call a re-rethinking. So it seems to be pretty easy for communities to think differently about housing in, say, downtowns and business districts, in that mix, because everybody-- many of us can look at our downtown, see that housing is not allowed in it, see that housing was once allowed in it, because there's that vacant second story over the Main Street, and be like, can we set this right again here?

And then, so, OK, well, then to do that, then you have to say, well, housing seems to be fine in the commercial district. That's how we built it that way. Well, if it's fine in the downtown. Could it not be fine out in our corridor, which is ugly anyways and a little bit underutilized, especially since COVID?

And so that seems to be a bait that many communities are easy-- not easy, but willing to take-- and to think about the commercial areas differently and how can housing thoughtfully blend. Just plopping an apartment building down in an ugly corridor does not solve all of our problems. But thinking about our corridors differently can have a really great outcome. And I think that's pretty easy to see for anybody who drives down that ugly corridor like today. OK, great. This could be fixed, and I need some housing. That would be great.

So that's the mix of commercial and residential. I also think that behind it, but possibly coming and certainly needed as part of this, is rethinking how our neighborhoods are. So for those of us that went through planning school, we learned about, in the early 1900s, this idea of a complete neighborhood that you almost never hear about in contemporary planning, this idea that sometimes in a 15-minute city.

But again, that's not really put at the neighborhood scale that any given neighborhood should have access to some commercial, should have some employment opportunities, should have some recreation that's embedded in it, should know where the educational facilities are and that it should be accessible through non-motorized means.

That's early 20th century planning that you don't hear about a whole lot now but that is really the thinking that's needed to change our neighborhoods from the suburban bias that has built many of them today, to a more livable context, not just in terms of affordability, but in terms of desirability once you get there.

TIM CORCORAN: Leah, but it's hard to do that. And so that's the problem is it's really difficult. You can put all the regulations in place. But if the finances don't seem to pencil to somebody, or they're not interested in it-- and that's why this idea of if a community thinks that's the right way to move forward with something, it's almost like they should identify the property, own it, get the partnerships, and then build it. Because once you do it once, then it makes it so much easier to do it a second, third, and fourth time to really embed those principles in other neighborhoods that. So it makes it repeatable.

KAREN CUENCA: Great. So last question to close out the Q&A. What's after zoning? So after communities make zoning changes, what are critical next steps for communities to keep in mind? How do you go about incentivizing now that zoning has been changed? And I know Tim touched on this a little bit with the partnerships and the developer programs. So we'll close on that note, on that question. Sorry, go ahead.

TIM CORCORAN: Well, for us again, we came to that what's next moment, where what's next was nothing or very little, for South Bend was like, OK, we have one of the most innovative codes in the Midwest maybe. And what did that mean? It didn't mean much. It didn't mean that people were just automatically coming to provide more housing in our community. We did a lot of outreach to our Home Builders Association. And they looked at me like I was from space. That's not what they did.

And so it's taken a long time to bring folks like that around. But I think it's that process part that I think Leah got into a little bit more about the development process of things is that once you've got your code right and you've got a great foundation, someone in whatever department should try to go through the process of building a new home in an infill neighborhood or in any neighborhood, maybe, and go through the process and find out where all that regulatory brain damage is happening-- and then really taking a close look at should we do that to people. Is it regulating what matters to us? And really honing in on that what matters and getting rid of the procedural things or changing things that would allow for the development process to run much smoother.

We can process a home application, a new home permit, in South Bend in a week. And if it's a pre-approved home, it can be done by the end of the day. And that is unheard of in many places. But it's because we went through the process with the building department, with engineering, with the fire department, and talked about that process and really looked at how we can streamline that, size it in a way.

And not only does it help for a pre-approved plan, but it helps for any plan in whatever it is that's being done in South Bend. So really regulating what matters and making sure that the process aligns to that was important for us to get the results that we've seen too.

LEAH DUMOCHEL: Agreed with all of that. So the City of Kalamazoo, here in Michigan, that has been learning so closely from South Bend found the exact same thing. OK, great. We have this new code. We have pre-approved plans. Let's try to make it work. And that's where the barrier surfaced. Look. Here's more things to change over the course of the next-- more quick fixes for the next three years.

I also think the other part of it. So after you have your regulations in place, who's the housing ecosystem? Who's the housing community? Who are the developers? Who are the affordable housing providers? Who are the advocates Planning and zoning are never expected to be the ones that we're then going to build according to the zoning code. But hearkening back to the planning that went before it, we have some idea of what we'd like to see there. So now the soft parts of it come together.

Who do we expect to do this? Can we bring them to the table? What barriers do they face? I hope we ask them that question beforehand. But if we didn't, let's start now and continue making our tweaks.

That mindset, the vitality, the growth, "we can do, that we're going to, that we're supportive" mindset-- it's so soft, and it's so squishy. And it is so important. But just getting people in the room, that's a physical, tangible thing. And it both contributes to that and moves it forward.

KAREN CUENCA: Great. Go ahead.

TIM CORCORAN: [INAUDIBLE] by the way, they've been-- I love the planners there. We have a lot of collaboration efforts but, also-- I like to think-- really friendly competition, like who can outdo the other one just a little bit. And we love doing it. And I always enjoy talking with them and coming up to Kalamazoo every now and again from South Bend, only about an hour, an hour and a half away, or something like that.

KAREN CUENCA: Well, thank you both. I'll just close out the webinar. I want to thank you, first of all, Leah and Tim, for taking the time to share your expertise and insights today. We hope that the information shared was useful to communities in the Seventh District that are looking at their own housing needs and looking to zoning as a potential strategy to unlock the housing supply that they need in their area.

And I also want to thank Lauren and Peter from the events team at the Chicago Fed for their support in producing this event. And we really appreciate the audience for your attendance and attention today. Thank you very much for joining and hope you have a good rest of your day.