Upzoning and redevelopment: The details matter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Facing worsening housing affordability, policymakers in a growing number of jurisdictions have heeded economists’ calls for increases in supply through relaxing land use restrictions, particularly on maximum allowed density and increases in the number of units allowed on a single lot. While floor space or floor area ratios (FSR or FAR) and unit count per lot are indicators of the potential for density, local governments have many levers to control the volume, type, and pace of new construction. In this paper, we compare changes in land prices and the pace of redevelopment following two similar, moderate density upzonings (up to four units per lot) of single family neighborhoods in the province of British Columbia (Canada). The upzoning in the City of Kelowna resulted in considerable new construction of higher density residential units as well as a significant increase in lot prices in the upzoned area relative to nearby areas with status quo zoning. In contrast, though the changes in allowed density were nearly identical, in Coquitlam there has been minimal uptake of new multiplex options and no discernible land lift in response to upzoning. We highlight the importance of other regulatory levers that are easy for analysts to miss in contributing to these different outcomes. The Kelowna upzoning was matched with an expedited development permit process for as-of-right fourplexes. In contrast, the Coquitlam rezoning did not alter the city’s lengthy development permit process required to build beyond the baseline duplex. Kelowna’s upzoning also required less parking than Coquitlam’s. An assessment of the regulatory environment relying on the presence of the upzoning alone would miss the alteration to process (or absence thereof) that appear to have had a significant effect across the two municipalities in whether zoning changes led to actual new construction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".