Bench & Bar September/October 2025

FEATURE: LEGISLATIVE UPDATE

parlance. Among uses excluded from stan dard R-1 zones are apartment buildings, senior housing, and low-income housing. It is illegal to build anything on 75 percent of U.S. residential land except single-fam ily detached homes. Some examples of how individual cities land on this metric are as follows: Minneapolis, 70 percent; Los Ange les, 75; San Jose, 94; Seattle, 81; Charlotte, 84, Portland, Ore., 77. 9 Higher neighborhood density achieved by loosening R-1 rules makes for difficult conversations before city councils and plan ning commissions. Vocal opposition nearly always is heard from those whose home equity often represents the bulk of their net worth. But the primacy in planning and zoning of protecting the single-family homeowner has been called into question by a cadre of modern planners and in city halls and state capitals across the country. Cities, the reformers argue, have become silent partners of investor-occupants in sin gle-family residential zones. 10

“Why is it the job of government to see that a housing unit accumulates as much value as possible?” asked Andrew Whittemore, a planning professor at the University of North Carolina. 11 Oregon has effectively banned single-fam ily residential zoning statewide, and the new law there eases the requirement fas tened upon developers to provide generous parking amenities. A ban on single-family residential zoning in California has been partially struck down in a constitutional challenge. 12 Minneapolis has ended sin gle-family zoning on 70 percent of the city’s residential land. Since Minneapolis did away with the bulk of its R-1 zoned ter ritory, it has added 12 percent to its housing stock in five years, with just a one percent increase in rents. 13 When Houston reduced minimum lot sizes from 5,000 to 1,400 square feet, the resulting boom in townhouse development increased the housing stock enough to slow rent growth.

Planners couch these changes in such terms as “gentle density,” building housing for the “missing middle,” and “creating more hous ing choices.” With House Bill 160, Kentucky has set out on a path to encourage more manufactured housing in cities. A standard local planning ordinance has manufactured homes cor doned off into their own zones, which will be illegal in the new regime. Contemporary thinking about manufac tured homes, whether mobile stock on wheels or factory-made construction, has evolved over the course of decades. The old epithets of “trailers” and “trailer parks,” and the dehumanizing insult for their occu pants, have slowly fallen out of use. MANUFACTURED HOME PLENTIFUL IN THE SOUTH The studies are not quite in agreement, but it is likely that at least 10 percent and as many as 14 percent of Kentucky homes are manufactured. The percentage among its neighbors is higher: South Carolina, 20 per cent; West Virginia, 16.6; Mississippi, 16.1; North Carolina, 15.8. Most manufactured homes in the U.S. conform to a 1974 federal law called the National Manufactured Housing Construc tion and Safety Standards Act, which was updated in 2000, and is called the HUD code. The standards enacted include those for roof load, wind resistance, thermal effi ciency, safety, and durability. HB 160 defines qualified manufactured homes covered by the statute as those built since enactment of the HUD code, includ ing those with or without a foundation, and narrows the definition of a covered home further: the home must not have been manufactured earlier than five years prior to installation. The home must be affixed to a permanent foundation, be at least 20 feet in height or be two stories high, oriented on its lot toward the street, and has a living area of at least 900 square feet. Materials in homes covered by HB 160 must be compatible with surrounding residential structures, so long as those materials do not

18 september/october 2025