A Housing Playbook (Outline) for the Rust Belt
What to Fix First When You Can't Fix Everything at Once
The permit office is a big bottleneck. Broken bureaucracy kills more projects than restrictive zoning by itself. Fix it first because it’s politically easy, helps everyone, and makes getting rid of zoning easier.
The zoning code doesn’t match the city that exists. Mid-century standards make thousands of lots unbuildable and cut off mortgage access, trapping neighborhoods in decline.
Big developers benefit from dysfunction. Complexity is a barrier to entry. The reform coalition may find better friends from smaller and mid level builders, not incumbents.
Sequence reforms by political feasibility. Start with what kills the most projects and provokes the least resistance. Each win builds credibility for the next.
The case against zoning has been made. It has been made well and repeatedly, with better data each time. I agree with it, and I made the case myself multiple times over. But telling a depopulated city to “just rezone” is about as useful as telling a broke person to “just earn more.” The city should, but unaccompanied by a strategy for implementation and state capacity that takes into consideration the local political economy, it’s not going to do well.
Brian Connolly and Noah Kazis’s Rezoning the Rust Belt does something more valuable than restating that diagnosis. Drawing on data and interviews across more than fifteen post-industrial Midwestern cities, they produce a detailed account of how land-use regulation actually impedes revitalization in weak markets: which rules bind, which processes break down, which political dynamics block reform, and which early efforts have worked. It’s an amazing piece of dense research/
I want to distill the paper’s findings into a politically realistic “outline of a playbook” for cities that want to grow but face real constraints: limited administrative capacity, fragile coalitions, and an entrenched development establishment that talks pro-growth but benefits from the status quo. Detroit’s experience shows what happens without sequence: its planning commission approved a package of reforms (lower parking requirements, four-unit buildings by-right in the R2 zone, small-lot flexibility) and, as of the article’s writing, the city council had stalled them.
The question, then, is strategic. If you cannot get everything at once, what do you do first? Where does each metaphysical dollar of political capital and administrative investment yield the most revitalization?
The Conventional Framing, and Its Limits
We should begin with why the Rust Belt has been left out of the conversation. Urban economics divides housing markets into three rough categories. First, supply-constrained powerhouses like the Bay Area and Greater Boston, where stringent regulations block construction and prices soar. Second, elastic Sunbelt markets like Atlanta and Phoenix, where housing supply keeps pace with demand. Third, low-demand post-industrial cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where prices often fall below the minimum cost of producing new units.
Leading zoning reformers discuss “land use controls in our richest regions and cities.” When researchers call for more empirical work, they ask for studies of Raleigh and Montana, not Toledo or Buffalo. The third category is either ignored or invoked by skeptics who argue that zoning reform is a parochial coastal project of limited relevance. If deregulation does nothing for poor, post-industrial cities, these critics suggest, its advocates must be exhibiting an “extreme myopia,” offering a prescription for “two or three coastal cities” that are the “whole object of reform.”
Where nobody wants to build, zoning’s constraints obviously don’t produce the housing shortages and affordability crises that motivate action in San Francisco or Boston. If curing supply shortfalls were reform’s only purpose, the Rust Belt would indeed be irrelevant.
But that framing is too narrow. Connolly and Kazis reframe the question: not whether regulation caps aggregate housing supply (it plainly does not in Detroit) but whether it imposes unnecessary costs on whatever development does occur, blocks cost-effective building designs, and prevents cities from seizing limited opportunities for revitalization. We think that reframing is overdue.
What the Paper Shows
Before turning to strategy, we should lay out what Connolly and Kazis find. Their empirical approach combines a close look at Detroit (quantitative analyses of building permit data, variance dispositions, and rezonings, plus qualitative assessments of over thirty case studies and interviews with public- and private-sector participants) with a survey of more than fifteen cities across the post-industrial Midwest, from Buffalo to Milwaukee.
The authors are candid about limitations, and that candor matters. Their permitting data capture only approved projects, not those scrapped due to regulatory friction. They interview active developers, not those who never entered the market. They cannot estimate the magnitudes of the effects they identify. But we think the qualitative evidence is strong enough to establish the basic claim: land-use regulation meaningfully impedes some redevelopment in these places, especially given how consistent the pattern is across cities. The selection bias almost certainly means the article understates the problem, though we cannot say by how much.
Two scope decisions are worth noting. First, the article examines center cities, not suburbs; redeveloping vacant lots in depopulated cities is not greenfield development. Second, it addresses both residential and non-residential development, an important corrective to a national conversation that focuses almost exclusively on housing. In Detroit, commercial uses comprise nearly twenty percent of all new-construction permits, and industrial uses over eight percent.
A Taxonomy of What Is Actually Broken
A. The Permit Office Is the First Bottleneck
In multiple cities, building permitting was identified as more problematic than zoning itself. Detroit’s process was described by one developer as “like running into a brick wall.”
The numbers bear this out. Detroit’s median time from building permit application to approval for new construction was 124 days. For mixed-use multi-family apartments, the median was 271.5 days. For townhouses, 248 days. Twenty percent of new-construction projects took more than a year to permit. When we account for project size, 4,313 new residential units took over a year to permit, and 2,093 units (nearly twenty percent of all new units) took over two years. These timelines generally do not include discretionary or site-plan reviews that occur before permit submittal.
The system works tolerably for small projects. The median time to permit for all non-minor permits was just fourteen days, and the city issued same-day permits for over a fifth of non-minor projects, mostly minor renovations and exterior repairs. But for the new construction and substantial alterations at issue in land-use debates, the system is deeply broken.
The causes are not primarily regulatory. Inadequate staffing is the most common culprit. In St. Louis, a by-right project was delayed by nine months simply because there was nobody to review the permits. In Detroit, a four-month delay resulted because only one person handles right-of-way permits. In Flint, an interviewee recounted that the city “just had a woman, she was a nice woman, her name was Sherry, and she did zoning.”
Antiquated technology compounds the staffing shortages. Detroit’s Board of Zoning Appeals only moved to an electronic database in fall 2025. The previous system required physical stamps from office after office. One consultant described it with a memorable comparison: “the three of us aren’t creative enough to come up with a more convoluted system if we tried.” In Cleveland, Buffalo, and St. Louis, agencies cannot view each other’s documents. The St. Louis planners’ self-assessment was blunt: “We’re not modern.”
Applicants, meanwhile, can’t get clear answers. Detroit’s own analysis concluded that it is unclear, to applicants and the city itself, when site-plan review is required, which department conducts it, and how projects proceed when it is not required. In Cleveland, the absence of a checklist of required documents is partly to blame for the forty percent of applications for smaller projects that are submitted incomplete.
And inspections are their own mess. Interviewees across cities reported inconsistent inspectors demanding different standards, uncoordinated schedules causing months of delay over minor issues, and contractors leaving idle projects to work elsewhere, only for new inspectors to surface additional unforeseen problems upon return. One developer’s summary: projects require “whack-a-mole.”
These are problems of institutional capacity, the accumulated decay of cities that lost their tax base and could not invest in basic administrative infrastructure. Investing in development-permitting staff and technology when there is little growth is hardly justifiable when essential services are suffering. But those budgetary choices now impede revitalization, and in multiple cities where zoning barriers had already been meaningfully addressed, permitting delays undermined the progress. The binding constraint, in many Rust Belt cities, is not what the code says. It is whether anyone is available to process the paperwork.
B. The Code Does Not Match the City That Exists
Post-industrial Midwestern cities maintain restrictive zoning rules (lot-size requirements, parking mandates, single-family-only zones) designed for mid-century conditions and barely updated since. Interviewees across the region routinely described their zoning as “outdated,” “antiquated,” or “old.” Several officials said their codes intentionally impose “suburban” requirements on urban development.
The specific mismatches tell the story. Nearly forty percent of Detroit is zoned R1, where only detached single-family homes are permitted, on lots of at least 5,000 square feet. The city’s average vacant lot is 3,200 square feet. Another twenty-two percent of the city is zoned R2, where duplexes are technically allowed, but height and setback rules make it physically impossible to build two homes on a lot. In Akron, the city’s official land-use policy is titled “Planning to Grow,” yet over 6,000 vacant parcels are legally too narrow to redevelop. In St. Louis, roughly 10,000 vacant parcels fail the city’s minimum lot-size requirements, despite their consistency with the city’s historical development pattern. Even along a Cleveland light-rail line, where higher density should be expected, 41.5 percent of the land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes.
These standards render much of the existing built environment nonconforming. Nonconformities do not just block new projects. They reduce existing structures’ utility: homeowners in Cleveland must seek variances for any enlargement, like a new deck or mudroom. They diminish properties’ value to lenders, who cannot be sure that nonconforming buildings can be rebuilt after casualty damage. Cleveland’s chief zoning administrator reported conversations with lenders three times a week over this issue. An Akron official put it plainly: “When you have non-conforming, a good chunk of the banks will just not play around that. You’re leaving that piece to the cash buyer.”
Because lenders already avoid small-dollar mortgages (which are riskier and uneconomical given fixed lending costs) nonconformities exacerbate a scarcity of mortgage capital in low-property-value neighborhoods, which depresses prices further. This facilitates purchases by institutional investors with alternative capital sources, or pushes buyers into riskier land contracts, deepening disinvestment. In a growing city, nonconformities are a nuisance. In a depopulated one, they are a trap.
C. Parking and Dimensional Standards Force Bad Designs, or No Designs
Parking requirements emerged as the single issue most frequently driving projects into discretionary review across the region. One Detroit consultant captured it: “We joke… every project is a parking project that has another use.” Eliminating parking requirements in Detroit could allow a typical lot to be developed as apartments rather than townhouses, with hard costs roughly $200,000 less per unit. For a single urban surface parking stall, construction costs approximately $10,000 excluding land, with annual operating and maintenance costs exceeding $2,000. Structured parking more than doubles that figure.
Setbacks are nearly as bad. In Indianapolis, the code technically permits townhouses, but setback requirements make them unbuildable. In Detroit’s R2 zone, duplexes are allowed on paper but not in physical reality, given height and setback rules. On a vacant, transit-accessible lot in Indianapolis, a proposed three-unit building was deemed “wholly inappropriate.” Citywide, restrictive zoning has “delayed most apartments that want to develop by-right.”
In weak markets, these are the difference between a project that pencils and one that does not.
D. Discretionary Review Chills More Than It Blocks
Nearly a quarter of Detroit’s new-construction projects required at least one form of discretionary review. Add rezonings and planned-development requirements, and the figure rises further. Certain development types face much higher rates: 29.4 percent of two-family dwellings required BZA review; 52.5 percent of permitted townhouse units underwent BZA review. In the R3 zone near downtown, where the most revitalization activity is occurring, a full 64.4 percent of dwelling units permitted required BZA review.
The primary cost of discretionary review in these cities is not denial. Approval rates are generally high. Detroit’s BZA granted seventy-three percent of petitions, and of those, eighty-three percent were unanimous. Cleveland’s chief zoning administrator estimated that their BZA grants “99 percent” of variance requests. The cost is delay, uncertainty, required modifications, and the developers who avoid the process altogether.
One Detroit consultant described the BZA as the “absolute last, nuclear option.” Even seemingly beneficial projects face opposition: in Detroit’s trendy Corktown neighborhood, a “high-end duplex” project on a previously vacant “lot that was collecting trash” had to cut four units to gain BZA approval. The vote was 3-2, on a community appeal.
The effects on affordable housing are especially severe. Affordable-housing developers in Detroit tolerate the special land-use process. But they do not pursue variances or rezonings because funding timelines are incompatible with those processes. If affordable-housing projects do not meet base zoning, they die. Not “they get delayed.” They die.
E. Subsidies Add Layers
Most Rust Belt projects require tax abatements, low-cost public land, or direct financial assistance. Each program adds its own substantive requirements, misaligned timelines, and discretionary processes on top of the permitting and zoning barriers already discussed.
Detroit’s land bank requires additional discretionary design review for purchasers, including criteria like whether projects provide “interesting building typologies of varied architectural styles.” Akron applies higher standards to projects receiving public land or money as a “backdoor way of getting a form-based code.” Milwaukee, for many years, had an “unwritten policy” that homes on lots purchased from the city had to be at least 1,500 square feet, making affordable housing unviable on city-sold land. Federal environmental review applies to all HUD-funded development, and Cincinnati’s planning commission conducted more than 1,000 such reviews in 2024 alone. For mid-size subsidized housing projects, an environmental assessment takes between three and nine months and costs four figures for single-family and five figures for multi-family, not counting carrying costs. One Indianapolis developer reported a two-year difference in timelines between two identical projects, one publicly funded and one privately funded.
Because subsidies are ubiquitous in these markets, every dollar spent navigating regulatory friction is effectively a dollar of public subsidy diverted from construction. Reform in this context is not merely pro-developer. It is pro-fisc.
The Fair-Weather Friends: Why Large Developers Are Not the Allies You Think
Connolly and Kazis observe that complex, discretionary processes systematically advantage large, regional, repeat developers with resources and political connections. In Detroit, large-scale development activity is heavily concentrated in two firms. City officials usually accommodate their needs. These firms can call politicians to resolve code-interpretation disputes, obtain city land to address site-layout problems, or unstick slow permitting processes. One developer was candid about his competitive advantage: “I got a guy.”
Large, repeat players hire consultants, conduct formal community outreach, and are represented at hearings by architects, engineers, and sometimes lawyers. Meanwhile, smaller and non-local developers stick to by-right projects and rehabilitation. Little gets built in between. One large developer acknowledged the disparity: “I feel for small developers.” But feeling for them is not the same as advocating for changes that would let them compete.
The authors note, carefully, that these firms are “not absolutely benefited” by the current regime. Fair enough. But the practical implication is significant: because the most powerful stakeholders are least affected by restrictive regulation, they are least likely to advocate for change. They have adapted to the dysfunction. They have built business models around navigating it. The complex, relationship-dependent system does not merely inconvenience them less than it inconveniences their competitors. In some cases, that dysfunction is a barrier to entry that protects their position.
We’ve seen this before outside of the paper, with wealthy developers siding with the NIMBY Andrew Cuomo for New York Mayor, and again in research as highly consolidated markets in the UK produce less housing and highly NIMBY and consolidated markets produce the least. Not to mention, deed restrictions and suburban zoning are a favorite tool of suburban large developers in Texas.
Large developers in the Rust Belt are pro-growth in the same way that incumbents in any industry are pro-competition: enthusiastically in principle, selectively in practice. They want the city to approve their projects. They do not need the city to make it easy for everyone’s projects to get approved. They are, at best, fair-weather friends of reform.
Who bears these costs matters, and the racial dimension is hard to ignore. Most real estate developers in Detroit, as one Black developer observed, “don’t look like me.” Black-led developers tend to have smaller operations and less-ready access to capital. By advantaging larger firms, the complex system disproportionately burdens them. Individual homeowners and small entrepreneurs, who in Detroit are overwhelmingly Black, face the same barriers. The very people who would most benefit from incremental, neighborhood-scale infill are the ones most excluded from the process of providing it.
This has implications for coalition strategy. Reform advocates cannot rely on large developers to lead. They will rarely push, and even if they do they may push back. The natural constituency for reform is smaller developers, affordable-housing builders, neighborhood organizations tired of vacancy, and city staff who see the dysfunction daily. In Detroit, Black developers have formed a trade organization that has advocated for zoning reforms. That is the kind of coalition that gets results, and it is the kind of coalition that benefits most directly from the playbook we propose.
The Outline of a Playbook:
The governing principle: reform what kills the most projects and provokes the least resistance first. Build from there.
Play 1: Fix the Permit Office
Nobody’s identity is wrapped up in defending antiquated technology or chronic understaffing. Permitting reform does not require rezoning hearings, does not trigger neighborhood opposition, and does not empower or disempower anyone. It requires money and management, not legislative battles.
And it benefits the broadest range of projects, from small by-right renovations to large subsidized developments. It disproportionately helps small and new developers who lack the political connections to unstick processes. When Kalamazoo revamped its permitting, it brought more small developers into the city. The question is whether every applicant, not just the well-connected, gets a functioning system.
Staff up plan reviewers, inspectors, and technical specialists, with state or federal funding if local budgets cannot support it. Digitize the permitting system: electronic applications, cross-agency document access, online status tracking. Publish clear, applicant-facing requirements, so that forty percent of applications do not arrive incomplete. Assign project shepherds from intake to certificate of occupancy. Codify review timelines and consider deemed-approved provisions for straightforward applications. Standardize inspections so that two reviewers do not demand inconsistent standards on the same project.
This isn’t glamorous. But the evidence in Rezoning the Rust Belt strongly suggests it would do more to accelerate development than any single zoning change.
Play 2: Eliminate Nonconformities and Unlock Vacant Land
This sits between administrative reform and substantive zoning change. It’s technical enough to avoid triggering neighborhood politics, but it affects thousands of properties and homeowners.
As we described above, mid-century codes render existing lots and structures nonconforming across these cities, choking off mortgage access and leaving vacant land undevelopable. The solutions are mostly mechanical. Reduce minimum lot sizes to match actual lot inventories. St. Louis is doing this now. Kalamazoo already did, and officials report new developments across the city that “couldn’t have happened without the rezoning,” from homeowners expanding their homes to adaptive-reuse projects in neighborhood commercial areas. Adopt broad nonconforming-use provisions allowing expansions, rebuilding after casualty, and changes of use without variances, especially for structures predating a certain date. Create vacancy-specific rules liberalizing what can be built on long-abandoned parcels. Indianapolis, for example, allows additional uses on parcels vacant for over five years, at which point almost all residential uses are permitted in commercial zones and offices in industrial zones. The provision has had limited success so far, but the principle is sound: the rules should be most permissive where the status quo is already abandonment.
One particularly promising approach: proactively rezone land-bank properties before sale, as Detroit’s land bank is now planning. This smooths the politics before the developer enters the picture. The alternative (making the developer navigate a rezoning while simultaneously assembling financing and managing construction timelines) is precisely the kind of compounding friction that kills marginal projects.
The political framing matters. This is pro-homeowner and pro-neighborhood-stability. Residents whose homes are currently nonconforming benefit directly. Lenders willing to finance conforming properties expand mortgage access in neighborhoods starved of capital. This is about aligning the code with the neighborhood that already exists.
Play 3: Parking and Dimensional Reform, Led by Pattern Books
With permitting improvements and nonconformity elimination underway, turn to the substantive zoning provisions that most commonly force projects into discretionary review or prevent them from being built at all.
Parking comes first. It is the single issue most frequently cited as driving projects into BZA review, and the cost savings from elimination are large. Several peer cities have already eliminated or reduced minimums (Buffalo, South Bend, Toledo), providing political cover and early evidence. In Buffalo, half of larger projects built after the reform provided fewer parking spaces than previously required, some by 100 spaces. For smaller-lot and nonprofit development especially, the effect was “pretty revolutionary.” Separately, by allowing adaptive reuse without a variance, Buffalo’s reforms sparked the creation of dozens of new small businesses in residential districts, including in substantially depopulated neighborhoods.
Setback and dimensional reform follows logically: these are the provisions that make duplexes technically legal but physically unbuildable in multiple zones. Reducing setbacks is less politically visible than legalizing new uses, and it can unlock substantial infill development.
Lead not with the abstract policy argument but with the pattern book. Pattern books are catalogs of free, pre-approved housing plans designed to comply with local codes and fit the architectural context. They are spreading rapidly across the Rust Belt, and for good reason.
Most directly, using a pre-approved plan allows developers to avoid hiring an architect, saving $5,000 to $10,000 per home in South Bend’s experience. Because the plan is pre-approved, it clears all permitting processes quickly, preventing the delays and modifications that kill marginal projects. In South Bend, the plans have been used to build 79 new homes across 64 buildings between 2022 and 2025. That is a modest number, but a significant proportion of new housing starts in a small city without a growing population. More tellingly, affordable infill developers have shifted their work from Indianapolis to South Bend, where the easier process stretches their resources further.
But the deeper value of pattern books is diagnostic. As Kalamazoo’s officials explained: “You become the shopper or the permittee for the first time.” Working their plans through the permitting process helped staffers resequence approvals to generate fewer meetings and fewer contradictory comments across departments. It let them spot cost drivers, like whether a second unit could “daisy-chain” utility lines or needed separate infrastructure. It helped them rethink their fee structure and reorganize staffing. They felt that advertising a pre-approved plan committed them to efficient permitting: “If we’re throwing in extra steps… that’s a false promise to the person who purchased the plans.”
Pattern books are a reform delivery mechanism, not just a design tool. They make the abstract concrete, showing residents what attractive infill housing looks like under reformed standards. They bring new, smaller developers into the market: both South Bend and Kalamazoo reported that new developers “cut their teeth” on pre-approved plans. And pattern books require, as a precondition, the kind of zoning and dimensional reforms we have been discussing. First you legalize contextual infill development, then you can speed it through permitting.
The strategic implication: pair parking elimination and setback reduction with pattern book rollout, so that residents see what they are getting, not just what they are losing.
Play 4: Density and Use Liberalization
With Plays 1 through 3 underway, the political landscape is different. Permitting works better and vacant lots are being built on. New developers are in the market. Residents have tangible evidence that reform can improve their neighborhoods.
Now pursue the harder stuff: legalizing multi-family housing by-right in more zones, allowing mixed-use development, and adopting form-based codes in targeted neighborhoods. The evidence from peer cities is encouraging, if uneven.
Cleveland’s 2018 reform, eliminating notice and variance requirements for townhouses, produced twenty-five projects by 2022, many with dozens of units and some in neighborhoods where the city is focusing investment. Concerns about aesthetics subsequently spurred additional design requirements, potentially slowing development. But the city has continued pursuing reform, piloting a form-based code in three neighborhoods. Anecdotally, planners observed that the form-based code was most consequential in the Hough neighborhood, an extremely poor area growing thanks to its proximity to the Cleveland Clinic, where it pushed projects across the margin for both affordable-housing developers and first-time builders of small three-to-four unit buildings. It mattered less where development was already proceeding or demand was too low.
Not all reforms work everywhere. St. Louis adopted form-based codes in a few already-revitalizing neighborhoods, and “development just exploded… developers got the certainty.” But when the city increased permitted densities near transit, the results disappointed. More permissive regulations could not overcome continued low demand. Indianapolis’s mayor claimed that its transit-oriented development policy alone enabled 1,000 additional housing units in one year, but in many locations it “hasn’t had the effect we wanted” because it was mapped onto corridors that were not “market-ready.”
Rezoning cannot create demand where none exists. But as South Bend’s planners advised, describing reforms that worked and those that fell short: “You start. You start with one thing.”
The political difficulty here is real. This is where gentrification fears, racial distrust, and aldermanic privilege converge. Milwaukee’s opposition to its “Growing MKE” plan, which called for doubling the city’s population, was so strident that the city abandoned the plan’s name entirely. Cincinnati’s NAACP helped kill a 2022 citywide upzoning over gentrification concerns. In Indianapolis, duplexes get special resistance for their association with low-income renters, even when both units are offered for sale.
These fears are not irrational. Black Detroiters have been failed by urban renewal, illegal tax foreclosures, environmental harms, and the collapse of city services. That history produces a background distrust that undermines residents’ concurrent understanding that growth is needed, reinforcing the felt need for discretionary checks against unwanted change, even as those checks impose costs on the very development residents want.
Houston illustrates the inverse. There, Black and Latino communities resisted zoning adoption partly because they distrusted a city government they expected to wield it against them. Same distrust, opposite institutional conclusion. The variable is not whether communities trust their government (in the Rust Belt and Texas for that matter, they mostly don't) but whether the regulatory apparatus already exists.
I do not pretend to have a formula, nor does the paper’s authors, for resolving these tensions. But the sequencing matters. A track record of reforms that demonstrably benefits the local community and small developers builds the credibility needed for harder conversations about density.
Play 5: Subsidy-Process Reform and Exactions
This is the hardest to reform without appearing to attack community interests.
Detroit’s community benefits ordinance is the leading example. It requires formal negotiations between neighborhoods, developers, and the city for large projects or those receiving significant tax abatements. One developer called it a “Pandora’s Box.” Another described staying below the ordinance’s thresholds to avoid “a laundry list of particulars.” The process lasts ten to fourteen weeks, and the requirement to hire local contractors drives up construction costs in a city with an undersupply of qualified workers. Small developers find it especially difficult to navigate.
Beyond the community benefits ordinance, ad hoc exactions arise through discretionary approvals and incentive negotiations. A developer of a large, by-right industrial facility was asked to relocate a road to reduce truck traffic impact on a greenway. A developer of a mixed-use project, who had already included a community meeting space and paid for new streetlights to secure approvals, was then asked in the incentive process to add expensive new design features. There are, as the article dryly observes, “many instances of officials taking a ‘value capture’ approach in places where there is little value to capture.”
These provisions were hard-won by communities with legitimate grievances, and they are wrapped in equity language. Frontal assault is politically unwise and arguably unjust. But the costs are real, and as we noted above, they are ultimately borne by the public subsidies that make most Rust Belt projects viable. Whatever the merits of value-capture techniques in high-demand markets (and reasonable people disagree) they badly fit post-industrial cities.
Better approaches: raise the thresholds that trigger community benefits requirements, ensure that city-funded neighborhood planning gives residents genuine voice without project-level extraction, and make the fiscal math transparent. Show communities what exactions cost in forgone development versus what they actually deliver. When many contractors pay fees rather than hire locally, the employment benefits are questionable; when developers avoid triggering thresholds entirely, the community receives nothing.
What We Still Do Not Know
We should be honest about the limits of the playbook we propose.
The equilibrium effects of zoning in oversupplied markets are hard to assess: if a project cannot be built on one vacant lot, it may simply move next door. More sophisticated empirical analysis, akin to that conducted in high-demand places, is needed. The Rust Belt deserves the same quality of research that has informed land-use policy elsewhere.
Permitting reform also requires sustained investment, not one-time fixes. Digitizing a system is easier than maintaining staffing levels in cities with structural budget deficits. Without ongoing state or federal support, improvements will erode, and the cycle of institutional decay will resume.
Pattern books, meanwhile, have produced promising but modest results, and only in small cities so far. Their scalability to larger, more complex markets like Detroit is unproven. The fair-weather friends may prove outright opponents; reforms that lower barriers to entry threaten incumbents’ competitive advantages, and reform coalitions should plan accordingly.
And our sequencing assumes that early wins build political capital for harder reforms. That is plausible but not guaranteed. Cities may pocket easy improvements and stall before reaching the structural changes that matter most.
My point being?
Connolly and Kazis have provided an excellent foundation. Their evidence points clearly: start with the permit office, then unlock vacant land, then reform parking and dimensional standards using pattern books as the delivery mechanism, then push for density and use liberalization with the credibility those earlier wins provide.
At every stage, the constituency for reform is not the large developers who have adapted to dysfunction, but the smaller builders, affordable-housing developers, and YIMBY organizations who bear its heaviest costs. Build the coalition from the bottom, not the top.
One more thing. Every reform on this list is worth doing on its own, regardless of whether the next step follows. That is the advantage of a playbook over a manifesto. Fixing the permit office helps even if parking reform stalls. Eliminating nonconformities helps homeowners and lenders even if density increases remain politically impossible. Pattern books bring new developers into the market even if form-based codes are years away.
You start with what you can win, and you build from there.