Where Legalizing Homes Cut Home Prices

BIGGER PICTURE | Rezoning rebuilt the missing lowest rung in Portland's homeownership ladder

A dot graph of new houses, both detached and “Middle Housing,” recently built in Portland, Oregon neighborhoods since zoning reform, with the size of the house on the horizontal axis and the selling price of the house on the vertical axis.

With houses, you pay more money to get more house -- hence the positive correlation between house size and price shown on these graphs. That relationship is so well established that "price per square foot" is the most common unit price that homebuyers use to judge value for money.

This is a graph of house prices and sizes for houses sold in established residential neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon since that city enacted a major zoning reform, with conventional detached houses on the left and denser "middle housing" on the right. The darker dots were units sold to market-rate buyers, and the lighter-colored dots are units sold to buyers where incomes and prices qualified them for city homebuyer assistance programs.