Savannah Mayor Van Johnson has introduced a “Housing Toolkit” that rewrites the city’s zoning map to allow multiplexes, townhouses and small apartment buildings on land currently zoned for single-family homes, offices or business use. The plan would also permit accessory dwelling units broadly and reduce off-street parking requirements. No vote has been scheduled yet, and the proposal will still have to survive a planning commission and council process where opponents typically show up loudest. But the substance of the plan is something other cities should study.
Savannah is not the first city to try to undo its tangle of regulations. Raleigh, North Carolina loosened its zoning in a similar way to allow more “missing middle” housing, and the results are measurable. Raleigh Planning and Development Director Patrick Young has said the city has approved or permitted more than 2,800 new housing units under the reformed code since 2021, calling it “one of the most productive” zoning-reform programs in the country. Buffalo eliminated parking minimums citywide in 2017. Minneapolis and St. Paul followed in 2021, and Austin did the same in 2023. The changes did not require a bond issue, a tax abatement or a new subsidy program. It required a council willing to allow property owners to develop their own land.
Housing affordability is usually considered a spending problem, solved with subsidies, tax credits or public-private deals. Savannah’s proposal is a reminder that it is often a permission problem first. A city does not need to spend to allow a triplex where only a single-family home is currently legal. It needs a council prepared to withstand the objections of the neighbors most invested in a frozen status quo.
Those objections are predictable and not unreasonable, but the evidence from cities that have already loosened these rules does not show the disruption critics predict. Parking demand, as researchers including Donald Shoup have documented for years, is routinely overestimated by planners guessing at need rather than builders responding to it. Character change from more duplexes and townhouses is also a smaller shift than the one already underway in many cities. There, zoning has ruled out everything between a single-family house and a luxury high-rise, so the high-rise is often the only new construction anyone can afford to build.
Mayor Johnson reframed who benefits. “Affordable housing is not just low-income housing,” he said. “It’s housing for mayors, police officers, reporters.” That disarms one of the more common objections to zoning reform: that it is really a fight over subsidized housing for someone else’s neighborhood. Missing middle housing is not a poverty program. It is housing for the teacher, the nurse and the young family who currently cannot afford anything the zoning code allows to be built.
Savannah has not passed anything yet, and a proposal is not a policy. But the toolkit approach is worth copying regardless of how the Savannah vote turns out, because the underlying tool is cheap, replicable and already proven elsewhere. Cities do not have to wait for federal housing dollars or a new tax to expand their housing supply. They can start by asking why a duplex is illegal on a block that used to have one.
