State Representative Joey Andrews is supporting a bipartisan package of legislation intended to help get housing costs under control in Michigan.

As more Michiganders are priced out of buying or even renting a place to live, the two parties in Lansing have come together for the Housing Readiness Package, which received testimony before the Government Operations Committee last week. Andrews tells us the bills seek to reduce permitting costs and zoning restrictions on developers.

“The premise is that we put a lot of money into programs to try to incentivize housing at the state level, but at the baseline, one of the biggest problems is that it is just impossible to build the housing, often because of very restrictive local zoning and regulation,” Andrews said. “So what the bills are trying to do is bring in the guardrails around local zoning so that you can’t use the zoning code to completely restrict different types of housing.”

Andrews says he represents seven of the fastest-rising zip codes for housing costs in the state, and one problem hurting residents is that developers cannot build housing to meet the demand in the area.

“The main thing we were really concerned with was that small apartments, duplexes, quadplexes, your mother-in-law suite kind of accessory dwelling situation, those sorts of things are banned in a lot of the communities almost by reference because of the way the zoning is set up.”

Andrews has included a bill in the package specifically focused on duplexes.

“My bill in the package makes it so that duplexes can be built in residential areas and that a municipality can’t ban the building of duplexes. There’s a bill that does something similar for like mother-in-law suites, kind of accessory dwelling unit type things.”

Other bills in the package would prevent communities from requiring single-family home lots to be larger than 2,000 square feet, reduce parking mandates, require local governments to decide on development proposals within 75 days, standardize setbacks, revise how residents can challenge zoning decisions, and prohibit communities from requiring homes larger than 600 square feet.

Andrews says the Home Builders association of Michigan is among the many supporters of the Housing Readiness Package because the costs of construction have become unsustainable.

“MSHDA, the state housing authority, estimated that about a third of the cost to build is in the regulation and approval process. And so that’s part of the impetus of this package is if we can take the approval process, part of the cost, out of the equation a little bit, then that can help bring the cost of construction down, which will also help to bring the rents down.”

Has there been pushback from local governments due to a loss of some control?

“Yeah, we’ve certainly heard from a few of our local governments that they think we’re taking away local control. I will say I’ve also heard from a few of our local governments that have said they wish they could pass some of these reforms, but that members of their commission will get so much pushback that they basically aren’t able to get them through. And so I think there’s some of them that are happy to let us at the stage be the bad guy a little bit in order to get some of these reforms done.”

The new legislation appears to have a reasonable chance of passage with support from enough members of both parties. Andrews says House Speaker Matt Hall, often reluctant to allow any bill to pass, is a supporter, as he understands it.

“I think we have one of those sort of rare bits of bipartisanship here where the governor and the speaker are aligned.”

You can learn more about the new housing legislation right here.