Gainesville Reverses Zoning Reforms, Reinstates Single-Family Zoning

The Gainesville City Commission passed ordinances overturning zoning changes made last October that eliminated single-family-only zoning in the city in the hopes of making housing more available and affordable. According to Nicholas Rubino, writing for WUFT, new commissioners expressed their disapproval of such broad zoning changes. 

“One of the biggest fears of single-family homeowners with no exclusionary zoning is that developers will come and buy up the land in their neighborhood and change their community forever.” Commissioner Ed Book admitted to the city’s housing shortage, but said “those gaps and those deficiencies are not going to be solved by the ordinances that were attempted to be put in place in 2022.” The commissioners who supported the reversal did not offer any new solutions for the housing crisis.

The October ordinances replaced single-family zoning with a new designation called “neighborhood residential zoning,” which loosened zoning restrictions to allow for apartment buildings. Cities like Seattle have made similar changes, though the impact of the new language remains unclear.

As an article in the Gainesville Sun points out, “The changes allowed developers the opportunity to build duplexes, triplexes and, in rarer occasions, quadplexes anywhere citywide based on an available lot size, similar to how housing is currently allowed in southeast Gainesville.” Gainesville, the first city in Florida to eliminate the single-family zoning designation, “will now be the first in the country to reinstate it − both coming within a six-month span.”