The Easy-to-Miss Reform in the ROAD to Housing Act Worth Preserving

Amid a challenging legislative landscape, the potential passage of a federal pro-housing bill offers a promising path forward. In mid-March, the Senate passed the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a mash-up of several other housing bills from both the Senate and the House. The compendium bill is now the subject of negotiations between the House and Senate. Although not perfect, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes some provisions that represent real progress.

The larger controversies surrounding the bill have overshadowed an easy-to-miss provision that would encourage local adoption of preapproved building designs. This provision is one of those rare reforms that offers something tangible to builders, local governments, homeowners, and renters alike. 

This provision is one of those rare reforms that offers something tangible to builders, local governments, homeowners, and renters alike.

How Preapproved Designs Work 

Among the many bills folded into the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the Accelerating Home Building Act,¹ a bipartisan piece of legislation introduced by Senators Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) and Bernie Moreno (R-OH). This bill—and, by extension, Section 211 of the Senate’s omnibus housing bill—is meant to encourage local governments and tribal entities to adopt preapproved designs for mixed-income housing projects. The legislation authorizes the Department of Housing and Urban Development to award grants to participating cities and directs the department to offer guidance and technical assistance.

A preapproved design is pretty much what it sounds like: an architectural outline that the relevant planning authority has signed off on in advance. In cities with preapproved designs, also sometimes referred to as “pattern zoning,” any proposed construction project that follows one of these designs gets fast-tracked for approval to build. 

Speeding up the approval process can, in turn, result in small but real cost savings for homebuilders; it cuts down on some of the costs associated with navigating the bureaucratic approval process and sitting on an undeveloped plot of land. This is essentially a win-win-win: Homebuilders get to move more quickly and save a little bit of money, the city doesn’t need to spend finite staff hours on design review, and the city as a whole gets more housing.

This is becoming standard practice in some other corners of the world: New Zealand and the Australian state of New South Wales both have 10-day approval pipelines. (New Zealand’s program has been in operation since 2010.) Recently, Canada also adopted a preapproved Housing Design Catalogue.

A Modest Reform with Outsized Benefits

Stateside, some local governments have also already made good use of preapproved designs. In 2020, the city of Bryan, Texas (where Texas A&M University is based) authorized such designs in its Midtown area, allowing for easier and faster development of modest residential density. 

San Jose, California, offers homeowners the option of using preapproved designs for accessory dwelling units (ADUs, backyard or in-law units). Remarkably, someone who utilizes one of San Jose’s pre-approved ADU designs can get a permit to build on the same day they file their application; in comparison, it takes more than 100 days on average for a non-preapproved ADU in San Jose to get entitled.

The Congress for New Urbanism estimates that Bryan’s pattern zoning system can yield savings of more than $8,000 per unit on some multifamily projects. That’s not very much when compared to the overall cost of development; but given the narrow margins in the building industry and the high cost of construction in many metropolitan areas, a few thousand dollars in savings here or there can make an important difference. 

Case in point, just one year after South Bend, Indiana, adopted its own preapproval program, the Niskanen Center estimated that “pre-approved home catalog projects could make up over 10 percent of annual housing starts in the city.” Reducing approval times in cities with very long permitting timelines could yield bigger savings and therefore more housing.

Sound regional collaboration and planning could make preapproved designs even more useful. As I’ve written before for the Roosevelt Institute, housing markets are regional in nature, meaning that fixing housing shortages requires a multi-jurisdictional approach. If, for example, multiple cities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area—say, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and Long Beach—all adopted the same preapproved designs, that could multiply the impact of those reduced timelines.

No doubt some people may object to the use of preapproved designs on aesthetic grounds. The “cookie cutter” charge carries some weight—the whole point of a pre-approved design is that it can be used to build more or less the exact same building multiple times. But “cookie cutter” can be beautiful. 

Some of a prior age’s cookie-cutter designs are now beloved architectural gems: Brooklyn’s brownstones, the old Victorians draped across San Francisco’s hills, and even the Parisian Hausmann Building. For that matter, some of the preapproved ADU designs in San Jose, such as the Abodu One, are quite nice. If you hit on a design that really works, there’s something to be said for reusing it.

The US is facing a dire housing shortage in its major metropolitan areas, and in order to resolve that shortage we’re going to have to learn how to build dense housing faster and at a lower cost.

But the main reason for embracing preapproved designs is economic: The US is facing a dire housing shortage in its major metropolitan areas, and in order to resolve that shortage we’re going to have to learn how to build dense housing faster and at a lower cost. That makes this modest provision exactly the kind of broadly useful, low-controversy reform that shouldn’t get lost as the legislation winds its way through Congress.

1. Because of the bill’s patchwork nature, a full summary and assessment of everything it does is well beyond the scope of a blog post. Those who want to see a section-by-section summary can find it here. ↩︎