Rust Belt city Akron, Ohio, has taken a rare step to reinvigorate urban housing development – eliminating minimum lot sizes.
After months of work, the city council voted unanimously this week to remove residential lot minimums. The ordinance rewrites decades-old zoning code that had made building smaller houses on lots impossible. A home, or multiple homes, can now go on any lot that meets yard requirements.
Few places have gone that far. Cities and states have generally reduced residential minimum lot sizes to encourage smaller homes. Others have taken a backdoor approach, passing laws that allow missing middle housing on single-family lots by right.
Explicitly pre-empting local governments on minimum lot sizes has become a red line as cities fend off state lawmakers to maintain local zoning control.
Texas passed a 2025 law barring its largest cities from requiring lots larger than 3,000 square feet in new subdivisions on tracts of five acres or more. It leaves existing neighborhoods alone. Idaho’s 2026 law shields starter-home subdivisions of at least four acres from large minimum lot sizes, such as 1,400 square feet.
State measures to pre-empt cities on minimum lot sizes failed this year in Colorado and Florida.
Attracting population to an affordable city
Austin, Texas, boomed before the COVID-19 pandemic. Florida cities experienced a similar boom during it, overwhelming housing supply. Then came the supply spurred by zoning reform.
Akron has lost population for five decades as its distinction as the “Tire Capital of the World” lost luster with the onset of deindustrialization. Mayor Shammas Malik, elected in 2023 after serving on City Council, made reversing that decline a focus of his administration.
The city is far more affordable than national averages. Its median existing home list price is about $149,000, according to HousingWire Intelligence, roughly a third of the $430,000 national median list price.
City officials have argued that reversing Akron’s decline requires attracting builders and middle-income residents, not just managing the losses. Zoning rules adopted decades ago blocked rebuilding what once stood there.
Planning Director Kyle Julien told Signal Akron after the council meeting that it was “just common sense” to eliminate the lot size requirements.
“It’s land we had decided as a policy matter didn’t have value, and now it has value,” Julien said.
Planning staff said the city holds hundreds of vacant former home lots under 4,000 square feet. West Hill Holdings, an Akron developer, analyzed county parcel data and counted 11,286 vacant lots in legacy-code neighborhoods that fell below the old minimums.
The analysis also found 4,594 existing one- to three-family homes sit on lots under 4,000 square feet.
Councilman Mark Greer said during the meeting that larger lot requirements spread in cities like Akron after 1968, the year the Fair Housing Act became law and outlawed redlining. The large-lot requirements were meant to be exclusionary, keeping people of color out of nicer neighborhoods and making lots more expensive, he added.
“This is a very important step in the right direction,” Greer said. “It is correcting a wrong that was done in the past.”
What changes in Akron
Akron’s approach is local and applies to neighborhoods under the city’s legacy zoning code. Merriman Valley and Summit Lake already operate under a form-based code that has no minimum lot sizes.
The ordinance does not determine which districts allow two or three units. Planning staff proposed the change in June, arguing the minimums contradicted long-standing development patterns in older neighborhoods. The Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval July 10.
Until now, a single-family house needed 4,000 square feet. A two-family home or apartment building needed 7,000 square feet and 60 feet of width. Smaller parcels required Conditional Use approval.
The ordinance also loosens related standards.
- Rear yards for one- to three-family homes drop to 15 feet.
- Side yards stay at a 5-foot minimum.
- Apartment buildings must set aside 10% of the lot as open space, down from 30%.
- Driveways can be 9 feet wide instead of 10.
Parking requirements remain.
Why lot size matters
Lot size shapes what residential developers can build economically. About 90% of municipalities impose minimum lot sizes on zoned lots, according to a research report by Tobias Peter and Ed Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center.
“The problem is that local land-use rules make it difficult to build more of them,” they wrote of starter homes.
AEI has joined YIMBY groups – an odd pairing – in pushing small-lot legislation in states, including California. The combination has recurred across the country. California’s starter-home law requires local agencies to approve small-lot subdivisions of 10 or fewer lots or units without a public hearing.
The median home in a new subdivision sits on about 7,000 square feet and was valued near $476,000 in 2025, or roughly 5.5 times the county median household income. Of 4.6 million homes built in new subdivisions from 2015 through 2024, only about 750,000, or 16%, were starter homes.
AEI modeled a national cap of 1,000 square feet on minimum lot sizes. With such lot-size standards, AEI estimates that production would have been about 85% higher, adding roughly 2.4 million starter homes. The typical home would sit on about 2,500 square feet, offer 1,400 square feet of living space, and be valued near $276,000.
Land has become a bigger share of the cost. Residential land values have climbed to nearly four times their 2012 level, while wages and construction costs rose about 1.5 times. Peter and Pinto say the result follows from the rule itself.
“If every new house must consume a large piece of land, it should not be surprising when the homes that get built are more expensive than they need to be,” the authors wrote.
