Calls to eliminate single-family zoning have become a familiar refrain in progressive municipalities across the U.S., including Oak Park. The stated goal is laudable: to expand housing options, address affordability, and correct the racial inequities embedded in 20th-century land-use policy.
Yet good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. Across the country, the elimination of single-family zoning has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises — producing limited affordability gains, accelerating speculative redevelopment, and often worsening the very inequities reformers claim to address.
This is not an argument for complacency or denial. Single-family zoning does have a troubling history. In many Northern cities, it functioned as a race-neutral proxy for racial exclusion after explicit racial zoning was outlawed. Large minimum lot sizes, bans on multifamily housing, and other ostensibly technical rules were used to preserve racial and economic homogeneity. That history should be acknowledged plainly and honestly.
But acknowledging historical misuse is not the same as endorsing present-day abolition. Policy must be judged by its actual effects, not its moral framing.
Across jurisdictions that have aggressively dismantled single-family zoning — including Minneapolis, Portland, and parts of California — the results have been underwhelming at best. The most common outcome has not been an explosion of family-friendly, affordable “missing middle” housing. Instead, zoning liberalization has tended to invite teardowns, luxury duplexes, and small-scale speculative projects that are affordable only in the abstract. A $900,000 duplex replacing a $700,000 single-family home may technically increase density, but it does nothing to expand access for middle-income families, let alone lower-income households.
The reason is structural. Zoning reform changes what may be built; it does not change what the market finds profitable. In high-demand communities like Oak Park, land values are already elevated. Removing single-family restrictions raises the speculative value of parcels, incentivizing developers to maximize return, not affordability. Without deep subsidies, income targeting, or public development mechanisms, “missing middle” housing tends to materialize as missing affordability.
This pattern has equity consequences. Longtime homeowners — many of them middle-class or fixed-income — face rising assessments, tax pressures, and redevelopment incentives that encourage displacement rather than inclusion. Renters, meanwhile, see little relief, as new units enter the market at price points far above median rents. The social fabric becomes more transient, not more integrated.
Moreover, the assumption that single-family zoning is the primary driver of racial inequality in housing oversimplifies a far more complex reality. Disparities in income, wealth, credit access, school funding, transportation, and regional job distribution all play decisive roles. Focusing reform almost exclusively on zoning risks treating a symptom while ignoring the disease. It also allows municipalities to claim moral progress without undertaking the more difficult work of funding public housing, enforcing fair housing laws, or confronting regional segregation patterns that lie beyond local zoning maps.
Oak Park, in particular, is not a closed enclave frozen in time. It already contains a substantial mix of housing types, including apartments, condominiums, two-flats, and courtyard buildings. The village’s challenge is not an absolute absence of density, but a mismatch between housing costs and household incomes — a problem zoning reform alone cannot solve.
There is also a civic dimension often overlooked in these debates. Zoning is not merely a technical instrument; it reflects negotiated community priorities about scale, infrastructure, schools, green space, and neighborhood continuity. Treating opposition to single-family zoning as inherently reactionary or racially suspect shuts down legitimate concerns and undermines democratic deliberation. A progressive community should be capable of holding two ideas at once: that past zoning regimes caused harm, and that sweeping deregulation is not a panacea.
None of this is an argument against change. Targeted reforms — such as allowing accessory dwelling units, incentivizing true affordability through public-private partnerships, preserving naturally occurring affordable housing, and investing in regional housing strategies — can expand access without triggering speculative churn. These approaches are slower, less rhetorically satisfying, and far more effective.
The danger of the current push to eliminate single-family zoning is not that it is motivated by equity concerns, but that it confuses symbolism with substance. If the result is higher prices, accelerated displacement, and cosmetic density, then the policy has failed — no matter how progressive the language used to justify it.
Equity deserves better than a zoning slogan. It requires realism, evidence, and the humility to learn from policies that have already been tried — and found wanting — elsewhere.
Sources can be found in the online version at oakpark.com.
Sources:
Einstein, Katherine Levine, Maxwell Palmer, and David M. Glick. “Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis.” Cambridge UP, 2019.
Fischel, William A. “Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation.” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2015.
Minnesota Department of Housing. “Minneapolis 2040 Housing Outcomes Report.” State of Minnesota, 2022.
Rothstein, Richard. “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” Liveright, 2017.
Schuetz, Jenny. “Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems.” Brookings Institution Press, 2022.
Robert Milstein is an Oak Park resident and former village trustee.
