Is Upzoning Really All That Bad?

“It’s first useful to remember that controversies about zoning are as old as zoning itself,” says C.J. Gabbe.

LOS ANGELES—There is a great debate is Los Angeles right now about the best path to growth and greater density. With several pieces of legislation up for vote on one side and developers looking to navigate an outdated masterplan on the other. According to new research from the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, upzoning may be unfairly stigmatized, and actually is a good path to accommodate the massive growth expected in the city—approximately 300,000 people expected to move to Los Angeles in the next several decades.

The school “quantitatively examine[d] where and to what extent Los Angeles has already been changing permissible density of its parcels and neighborhoods, finding that upzoning is “much more rare than indicated by the alarm sounded by anti-density advocates. It also shows that upzoning tends to occur in neighborhoods with smaller shares of single-family homeowners, suggesting that political opposition to density has effectively directed the City’s growth.”