Vapid & Plastic
Take a stroll down any street in my neighborhood in Durham, which many on this blog have called the Mecca of the South, and you’ll quickly notice the tell-tale sign that you’re in a quickly gentrifying, liberal leaning area: the lawn signs.
Black lives matter. Science is Real. Housing is a Human Right. Stop the Steal. (Just kidding about that last one)
These signs are sometimes critisized as virtue signaling But I’m not here to argue about lawn signs. I do believe that in the broad, middle to upper-middle class Democratic base there is a pervasive hypocrisy when it comes to political priorities espoused (often via lawn ornamentation) and the actions that defend and hoard opportunities for others. I was lucky to take a seminar from Richard Reeves of the Brooking Institute on the very subject, and he’s written prodigiously regarding this very confluence of virtue signaling and policy setting. These double-standards are nearly as ubiquitous as the aforementioned lawn signs: university legacy admissions, fiscal policy such as the mortgage interest deduction, 529 plans, estate and sales tax and most recently the absurd SALT deduction - which Reeves argues should be completely eliminated, and house zoning.
I found myself wondering, are Durham zoning laws reflective of a majority Democratic enclave, a quickly growing liberal bubble? Are we, like many other cities in America, zoned predominately for single-family households? And above all, are Durham’s zoning ordinances aligned with beliefs of all those stupid lawn signs?
Note: Durham’s Comprehensive Plan is being updated, so zoning ordinances are likely to occur.
EDA
I wish I could take a time machine back to a younger Jake, complaining about a problem set in his graduate quant class. Oh, is that perfectly cleaned data set provided by the professor annoying to load into your program? Is the codebook too succint? I wouldn’t hit this Jake, violence is never the answer, but I would shake him a bit.
The question we’re trying to answer is to what degree is Durham’s zoning amenable to non-single family homes? Using 2020 census data, we can determine the percentage of Durham-ites zoned for single or multiple family homes. Growth in households and population will be measured based on where that growth is occuring by zone type. First, we need the zone type.
Zone Types
Durham’s zoning data is publicly available, and is classified in an understandably long-winded manner. Below are the initial zone types:
COMMECIAL COMMERCIAL
1 520
COMMERCIAL GENERAL COMMERCIAL INFILL
3 2
COMMERCIAL_INFILL COMMERCIAL_NEIGHBORHOOD
1 1
COMPACT DESIGN-CORE COMPACT DESIGN-PEDESTRIAN BUS.
2 1
COMPACT DESIGN-SUPPORT 1 COMPACT DESIGN-SUPPORT 2
1 2
COMPACT SUBURBAN DESIGN DOWNTOWN DESIGN-CORE
4 2
DOWNTOWN DESIGN-SUPPORT 1 DOWNTOWN DESIGN-SUPPORT 2
5 8
INDUSTIRAL INDUSTRIAL
2 174
MIXED USE MIXED_USE
1 15
OFFICE_INSTITUTIONAL RES_HIGH_DENSITY
247 419
RES_LOW_DENSITY RES_MEDIUM_DENSITY
447 166
RES_RURAL_DENSITY RESEARCH
177 13
RURAL RESIDENTIAL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE-2
1 2 As the songbird of our generation Carly Rae Jepson once said, let’s cut to the feeling.
Let’s collapse each zone into broad buckets: residential, commercial, university, downtown and compact. The last two will be treated nearly identically. Compact is a newer designed zone theorized to increase density, multimodal traffic like transit and bike lanes, and allow access to work and play in and around Durham.
The below table from the previous Durham Comprehensive Plan shows the below table, which we will use to approximate dwell units permitted on each type of zone. Downtown zones in the ‘High’ Density have a hilarious “unlimited” density limit, so I’m expecting a new Burj Khalifa sooner rather than later with that type of free reign. Note, I will use the median value of the density ranges, but it doesn’t matter too much, as you’ll see.
After collapsing, we get the following reduced zones below.
Commerical Compact Downtown Residential University
969 10 15 1223 11 The interactive map shows these collapsed categories for the whole county. Most of the county is zoned residential, which makes sense. Commercial zones mainly follow along the major highway corridor NC 147 and I-40, along with smatterings here and there. The compact zones are relatively concentrated just north of Duke’s main campus. There are a number of condos and apartment buildings, a few hotels even, in that zone.