Michigan's Housing Reform Bills Are the Real Deal

Michigan’s Housing Readiness Package

Michigan is short 119,000 homes¹. The median home price has risen dramatically over the past decade. Working families and first-time buyers are being priced out. For the last 100 years, we’ve allowed a patchwork of 1,773 different local bureaucracies to make it illegal to build the very housing options that once made our neighborhoods vibrant and affordable.

Last week, a bipartisan, bicameral coalition of Michigan legislators said “enough!” They introduced the Michigan Housing Readiness Package, nine bills designed to strip away the red tape and make housing affordable again, and they deserve your support. Call your Representative and let them know how you feel!

The Michigan Municipal League (MML) is already working the halls of the Capitol to kill these reforms. Notably, they represent city governments, but NOT the citizens who actually live there. While cities are supposed to serve their citizens, the MML is trying to preserve city control at the expense of its citizens. They are circulating talking points designed to fan the flames of fear and keep our housing supply scarce and expensive. We cannot let them succeed.

What’s Actually in These Bills

Both Democrats and Republicans are describing these bills the same way, which, in today’s political climate, should tell you something. You can track their progress through committee using Abundant Housing Michigan’s tracker. Here’s what they do, in (my own opinion of) order of importance:

1. Duplexes by Right - HB5584

This is the single biggest lever in the package. Between Kent, Ottawa, and Muskegon Counties, 70.6% of all land is prohibited from building anything except for the most expensive, least efficient form of housing: single-family homes²! 😱 This is fairly typical for cities in Michigan and across the country. This bill changes that by allowing duplexes anywhere a single-family home is allowed!

Why does this matter so much? Because duplexes can DOUBLE the amount of legally allowed housing while still being built under the International Residential Code (IRC), which applies to one- and two-family dwellings, rather than the more expensive International Building Code (IBC) required for larger multifamily buildings. That means they’re relatively cheap to build, they fit naturally into existing neighborhoods, and they create more housing choices in connected communities, making neighborhoods more affordable while preserving their character.

One of the most striking visuals of the report linked above is found on page 10:

2. Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) By Right - HB5585

ADUs are secondary dwelling units on the same lot as a primary home — think basement apartments, garage conversions, or small backyard cottages. I’ve built several of them and even started a small business to help other homeowners do the same. They’re a powerful tool for adding more home choices tucked into existing neighborhoods without changing a neighborhood’s look or feel, and because it’s small-scale, this allows average citizen to help solve their communities’ housing shortage while also building wealth.

For Grand Rapids specifically, the 75% of gross square footage cap in this bill is notably more generous than our current 40% limit. GR’s existing ADU ordinance is already relatively permissive, but statewide standardization takes the lessons we’ve learned and helps everyone, instead of asking every one of Michigan’s 1,773 municipalities to make these changes individually.

Note: Taken together, HB5584 and HB5585 would make at 3 homes legal on every residential lot — one duplex plus an ADU. That’s a HUGE shift in what property owners are allowed to do with their own land, and meaningfully increases the amount of homes we can build!

3. Limiting Minimum Parking Requirements - HB5582

Parking minimums are one of the most quietly destructive forces in urban housing. By mandating that every unit come with a certain number of parking spaces — regardless of whether residents own cars — cities have forced developers to dedicate expensive land to asphalt instead of homes. We must stop prioritizing car bedrooms over homes for people we rely on, like our local teachers and healthcare workers. This bill limits those requirements and also prevents municipalities from excluding mobile homes from residential zones. Mobile homes are genuinely affordable housing. They deserve a place at the table. Notably, ending parking mandates is one of StrongTownGR’s core policy priorities.

This one deserves its one caveat, because I often hear “But where will people park!?” Limiting minimum parking requirements means the government can’t require a developer to provide parking. But guess what, most developers want to provide parking because tenants still want it. So limiting what can be required doesn’t suddenly get rid of all the parking; what it does is put that decision back in control of the person with an economic interest to get that number correct.

The Sightline Institute developed this infographic that highlights the absurdity of prioritizing cars over people:

4. Allowing Minimum Lot Sizes of 1,500 Square Feet - HB5529 & HB5530

The average lot in Grand Rapids is around 5,000 square feet. Under current law, you can’t subdivide it to create more homes. These bills change that and allow for smaller starter homes on smaller lots, giving working people a path to build long-term wealth and stability. On a standard GR lot, you could potentially fit three homes where one currently stands — if the owner chooses to do so. No one is forced to do anything. These bills are an expansion of freedom.

5. Limiting Excessive Setbacks - HB5583

This says that municipalities can’t require setbacks of more than the following:

• front yard: 15 feet
• rear/side: 5 feet

In lieu of front yard setbacks, Grand Rapids currently uses a Required Building Line that measures from the curb instead of the property line and has to be 27’ in most areas. As long as the city right-of-way is 12’, that would be fine, but if there were instances where it was smaller than that, they’d need to reduce it.

While GR currently sets the side yards setbacks at 5’, it inexplicably requires that the sum of both sides be 14’ instead of 10’. I previously wrote an article about the absurdity of this.

Here’s my back-of-the-napkin math on what this would mean for Grand Rapids: changing de facto side yard setbacks from 14 feet to 10 feet would free up roughly 9% more buildable space per lot. Across Grand Rapids’s approximately 2,579 acres of residential land, that’s about 112 million additional square feet — enough for roughly 22,500 new homes over time! This isn’t a quick fix; it plays out as parcels are redeveloped over decades. But small changes in the rules compound into massive changes in housing options over time.

6. Legalizing Homes as Small as 500 Square Feet - HB5581

Smaller homes are more affordable to build, heat, and maintain. Right now, many Michigan cities have bans on smaller homes, effectively pricing out young families and seniors. The City of Wyoming, for example, makes it illegal to build a single-story home smaller than 1,040 square feet. This bill ensures that no city can ban a home just because it’s small—setting a statewide standard of 500 square feet.

This is small enough to allow for genuinely affordable starter homes without forcing anyone to build them. It simply gives homeowners and builders the freedom to choose the size that fits their budget.

As our families get smaller, we should allow our homes to “right-size” too. Decades ago, our homes were smaller, and our families were larger. Today, we’ve reversed that: we are building massive houses for fewer people, leaving many neighbors with no affordable options at all.

7. Reforming Protest Petition Rules - HB5532

Currently, just a handful of nearby property owners can trigger a protest petition that effectively vetoes a zoning change — even one that would benefit the entire neighborhood. This bill raises the threshold from 20% of property owners within 100 feet to 60% within 300 feet. That’s a much more meaningful democratic check, rather than giving veto power to the closest few neighbors.

8. Requiring Upfront Disclosure of Permitting Requirements - HB5531

Developing housing is already complicated. One of the most maddening and costly problems builders face is when local planning departments can keep adding new requirements throughout the review process, long after a project has been designed around an earlier set of rules. This bill requires that municipalities state their requirements upfront and make a decision within 60 days. It eliminates moving goalposts that drive up costs and kill projects.

Does This Actually Work? Evidence from the “Laboratory of the States”

Opponents will tell you that state-level changes won’t actually lower costs. But we don’t have to guess; we can look at the states that have already lifted these bans on affordable home choices.

• California’s ADU Boom: Since the state began preempting local bans in 2016, California has seen an astronomical 15,334% increase in ADU permitting³. By 2022, roughly 19% of all new housing produced in California was an ADU (1 out of every 5 new homes)! This proves that when you remove “death by a thousand cuts” regulations, like owner-occupancy mandates and excessive parking, homeowners will step up to help solve the shortage.

• The “Montana Miracle”: In 2023, Montana passed a bipartisan package nearly identical to Michigan’s⁴. While it faced early legal challenges from anti-density groups, the Montana Supreme Court upheld the reforms in 2024, ruling that housing affordability is a legitimate state interest that justifies overhauling restrictive local rules. In 2025, the state even doubled down, expanding these freedoms to unincorporated areas and further reducing parking mandates to keep home prices from spiraling.⁵. Is it working? Honestly, it’s early. Cities aren’t even required to comply until May 2026, and most planners there will tell you the full impact on rents and construction won’t be measurable for years. The Montana Budget and Policy Center still estimates a deficit of around 15,000 rental units for low-income households. Some cities, like Bozeman, haven’t changed much — because they’d already been allowing ADUs and duplexes voluntarily. The cities that voluntarily embraced these reforms early are doing fine. The ones that didn’t are still stuck and waiting. Whitefish — where home prices surged 71% between 2019 and 2021, making it one of Montana’s most acute affordability crises — is now one of the fastest-growing communities in the state as reforms take hold.⁶

• The “Filtering” Effect: A massive 2021 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) confirmed that when you increase the supply of market-rate homes, it reduces the “bidding war” pressure on lower-cost homes nearby, preventing displacement⁷.

Michigan isn’t blazing a trail here; we’re following a map that other states have already drawn.

“Not only do state policymakers have the authority to limit local zoning rules, they have an obligation to do so when these restrictions cause statewide affordability problems. At the local level, the costs of new housing are salient. New residents may mean more traffic, more people parking on the street, and the inconvenience of construction. At the state level, these highly localized costs can be weighed against the widespread benefits of population growth, job growth and affordability improvements that construction can bring.”⁵

The Michigan Municipal League Is Not Telling You the Truth

The MML claims zoning is only a small part of the equation, that these bills hand power to developers, and that local control is sacred. All three claims fall apart under scrutiny. Zoning is the foundational constraint — every other cost driver operates on top of it. The bills actually help small-scale builders and homeowners by removing the bureaucratic gauntlet that only large developers can afford to navigate. And Michigan already uses statewide standards for building codes and environmental rules, and nobody calls those anti-democratic. These bills follow the same model. While the MML defends a failed status quo of bans on affordable housing choices, these restrictions ensure that only the wealthy can outbid everyone else, while local workers are displaced and forced to move further away.

The infrastructure concern is the only one worth taking seriously, but it’s actually an argument for these bills. Since 1950, average household sizes have dropped from 3.5 people to just 2.5 today. This means we need 40% more homes just to house the same number of neighbors we had seventy-five years ago. When we ban new home choices, our neighborhoods thin out, leaving fewer people to pay for the same miles of pipes, roads, and schools. Allowing more homes doesn’t burden our infrastructure; it spreads the maintenance costs across more ratepayers, keeping utility bills lower for everyone. Plus, school enrollment has been declining in most Michigan districts.

The irony is that the MML’s own “MI Home Program” proposal actually acknowledges the same solutions found in the Housing Readiness Package. Their plan admits we need to:

• Allow ADUs ✅
• Allow Duplexes ✅
• Reduce minimum lot sizes ✅
• Reduce allowable dwelling unit size ✅
• Reduce approval and expedite reviews ✅
• Reduce residential parking requirements ✅

If they agree on the solutions, why are they fighting the actual legislation? There are two primary differences:

1. The Opt-out Loophole: The MML thinks these reforms should be entirely optional and piecemeal. But as we’ve seen for a century, “optional” is just another word for “status quo.”

2. The $800 Million Price Tag: They want almost 1% of the entire State budget paid to municipal governments just to stop banning affordable home choices. The Housing Readiness Package accomplishes everything the MML purports to want. It just costs $800,000,000 less.

This isn’t a serious attempt to house our neighbors; it’s “innovation theater” designed to delay progress while the bidding wars for homes continue. Instead of subsidizing bureaucracy, we need to lift the bans that are keeping families from the homes they need.

The Pincer Maneuver: Who is Really Fighting Your Home Choices?

It isn’t just the MML. A coordinated effort is underway to ensure Michigan’s housing shortage remains a crisis for decades. While the MML pressures Democrats in Lansing using “equity” and “infrastructure” language, the Michigan Townships Association (MTA) and the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) are running a pincer maneuver to flip Republicans against the package.

The MTA’s recent “Urgent Alert” to its members is a masterclass in the failed status quo. They claim these bills “place the blame solely on local governments.” But this isn’t about blame, it’s about results. We have had 100 years of “local input,” and the result is a shortage of 119,000 homes. The MTA is essentially asking for the “freedom” to continue banning affordable home choices that Michigan families desperately need.

They often use the phrase “one-size-fits-all” to scare off legislators. But let’s look at the reality:

• The Failed Status Quo: Our current system is the true “one-size-fits-all.” Across 70-80% of our land, the only legal choice is a large, expensive house nestled on a huge, oversized lot with massive setbacks.

• The Real Choice: These bills actually legalize variety. They allow for duplexes, backyard cottages, and smaller starter homes. These bills don’t mandate one type of building; they stop mandating only the most expensive type.

The MTA also attacked HB 5531, which creates a 60-day “shot clock” for permit decisions. They call this a restriction, but builders call it certainty. When a local government can move the goalposts for months or years, it adds tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of every home. These costs are passed directly to the family buying it. A 60-day window ensures that homes for the people we rely on aren’t held hostage by endless bureaucracy.

The MTA says they want the “freedom to engage in vigorous debate”, but I believe Michigan families deserve the freedom to have a home they can actually afford.

The Deeper Issue: Local Control Is the Problem, Not the Solution

The MML frames these bills as an attack on local democracy, but who is the most local decision-maker? The property owner. The homeowner who wants to rent out their basement. The middle-aged family that wants to build a small backyard cottage for an aging parent. The small-time landlord who wants to add a unit to their lot.

Right now, those people are prohibited from exercising their own judgment about their own property by zoning codes written to protect the interests of neighbors who’d rather keep housing scarce and expensive. These bills actually reassert the localest of all control: a principle espoused by the MML, but their propaganda reveals their bias: they work for cities, but NOT for citizens of those cities.

Stephanie Nakhleh, writing about what happened recently in Albuquerque when similar reform efforts were blocked at the local level, put it perfectly: the so-called “one-size-fits-all” system is the one we already have — one detached single-family house per lot, mandated by law across thousands of parcels, city after city, regardless of what families actually need. Instead of “local flexibility”, that’s a top-down mandate that’s been in place for a hundred years, so long that we’ve forgotten it’s a choice.

What the MML is really defending is the ability of a small group of entrenched homeowners to veto the housing needs of everyone else — renters, young people, working families, seniors who want to downsize — without ever having to justify it on the merits. When they lose the policy argument (and they have; the research⁷ is⁸ clear⁹), they fall back on procedure: who decides matters more to them than what the outcome is.

We’ve had local control of housing policy for a hundred years. Here’s what it gave us: housing that was once cheap and plentiful has become a luxury good that’s scarce and expensive. If local control had been working, we wouldn’t need these bills.

The Coordination Problem: Why Local Control Fails

The MML frames these bills as an attack on local democracy, but this ignores a fundamental reality of human behavior that social psychologists call a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Think of local zoning like the “Cell Phone Problem” for parents. In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt points out that most parents wish they could keep their kids off social media and cell phones, but they fear their child being the only one left out and socially isolated. Without a way to coordinate, every parent gives in, and all kids are worse off.

We just saw this play out in real-time: Governor Whitmer recently signed legislation for a statewide cell phone ban in K-12 classrooms. The state is providing the necessary coordination to free parents and schools from a cycle no one actually liked.

Housing is exactly the same. Individual cities are trapped in a cycle of blocking growth to appease a vocal minority of neighbors, even though every city would be better off if the entire region had more housing. When every municipality plays the “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) card, the whole state loses. Just as with cell phones in schools, we need a higher-level rule to provide the coordination that allows all Michiganders to win.

Don’t take my word for it; even researchers who once favored local control have changed their minds: in 2025, Shane Phillips and Paavo Monkkonen were having a conversation on Phillips podcast UCLA Housing Voice¹⁰. Paavo explained that he used to favor local control until he realized that when a local municipality wants to update its zoning ordinance, it’s usually an eight-year planning period. That’s almost a decade!

He says:

“I think that if the state were serious about a housing crisis, they would be taking much more dramatic action… [like] a state direct preemption into local zoning regulations would be much more effective at this point than a goal-guided process. [When cities were given this choice they] were saying ‘No, no, we can do it, if you just give us the tools and…we’ll take care of it.’ And this is the result. It’s just not happening.”

So if we don’t want to wait almost a decade for anything to happen, we NEED these preemptions to be built directly into Michigan’s Zoning Enabling Legislation. For reference, Grand Rapids launched its process to update its Community Master Plan in 2022. The current projected timeline for adoption is 2027, so five years. A bit ahead of Paavo’s eight-year, but still not fast. 😩

Why the Resistance?

As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The lobbyists fighting these reforms are protecting their own relevance as gatekeepers. They are paid to defend the “Mother-May-I” system of zoning because their organizations exist to protect municipal power — not the people who actually live there.

To the professional planners in our city halls: It’s evident you want to protect your community. But these bills are an administrative shield, not an attack. Right now, you’re forced to referee neighborhood shouting matches over a single duplex. That’s not planning; that’s conflict management. Clear statewide standards will free you to focus on the work you actually trained for: transit, parks, and long-term infrastructure solvency. We need you at the table.

What You Can Do Right Now

These bills are currently in committee. That’s where good legislation quietly disappears while lobbyists run out the clock — but only if the people who benefit from the status quo are the only ones making noise.

Make some good noise by calling or emailing your state representative and senator today. Tell them you support the Michigan Housing Readiness Package and want to see these bills move out of committee for a full vote. If you don’t know who represents you, find out at https://www.michiganvotes.org/legislators.

You can track the bills and find more resources at AbundantHousingMI.org. The people who want to kill these bills are organized and loud. They’re counting on you to stay quiet.

Don’t!

Musical Coda

"It's a long, long wait while I'm sitting in Committee."

— Bill