Akron’s city council voted unanimously this week to eliminate residential minimum lot sizes — a sweeping zoning change that puts more than 11,000 currently vacant parcels within reach of builders in one of America’s most affordable and most population-depleted legacy cities.
The ordinance, reported Monday by HousingWire, removes the 4,000-square-foot minimum that had applied to single-family homes and the 7,000-square-foot threshold — paired with a 60-foot width requirement — that governed two- and three-family properties. A home, or multiple homes, can now go on any lot in Akron’s legacy-code neighborhoods as long as it meets yard setback rules.
Few American cities have gone that far. While states from Texas to Idaho have recently moved to limit minimum lot sizes in new subdivisions, a municipal ordinance covering existing neighborhoods outright is uncommon. About 90 percent of U.S. municipalities still impose minimums, according to research by the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, whose housing economists have argued the rules are the single biggest structural barrier to affordable homebuilding — functioning as a legal floor under land cost, and therefore under home prices…