Akron Scraps Minimum Lot Sizes to Open Way for New Homes
Akron's city council voted unanimously to remove residential lot minimums in neighborhoods under its legacy zoning code, a step few US cities have taken.
Akron, Ohio, has eliminated minimum lot sizes for housing. The city council voted unanimously this week to remove residential lot minimums, rewriting decades-old zoning rules that made it impossible to build smaller houses. A home, or several homes, can now go on any lot that meets yard requirements.
Few places have gone that far. Cities and states have mostly reduced minimum lot sizes, and some have passed laws allowing "missing middle" housing on single-family lots by right. Texas passed a 2025 law barring its largest cities from requiring lots above 3,000 square feet in new subdivisions on tracts of five acres or more. Idaho's 2026 law shields starter-home subdivisions of at least four acres from large minimums. State measures to override cities failed this year in Colorado and Florida.
What the ordinance changes
The change applies to neighborhoods under the city's legacy zoning code. Merriman Valley and Summit Lake already use a form-based code with no minimums, and the ordinance does not decide which districts allow two or three units. 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, and smaller parcels required conditional use approval.
Related rules were loosened too. Rear yards for one- to three-family homes drop to 15 feet. Apartment buildings must set aside 10% of the lot as open space, down from 30%. Driveways can be 9 feet wide instead of 10. Planning staff proposed the change in June, and the Planning Commission recommended approval unanimously on July 10.
Why Akron did it
Akron has lost population for five decades since the "Tire Capital of the World" deindustrialized. Mayor Shammas Malik, elected in 2023, has made reversing that decline a focus. The median existing home list price is about $149,000, according to HousingWire Intelligence, roughly a third of the $430,000 national median.
Planning staff said the city holds hundreds of vacant former home lots under 4,000 square feet. The developer West Hill Holdings counted 11,286 vacant lots below the old minimums in legacy-code neighborhoods, and 4,594 one- to three-family homes on lots under 4,000 square feet. Planning Director Kyle Julien told Signal Akron it was "just common sense": "It's land we had decided as a policy matter didn't have value, and now it has value."
Councilman Mark Greer said large-lot requirements spread in cities like Akron after 1968, when the Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining, and were meant to be exclusionary. "It is correcting a wrong that was done in the past," he said.
Research by Tobias Peter and Ed Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute says about 90% of municipalities impose minimum lot sizes. Of 4.6 million homes built in new subdivisions from 2015 through 2024, only about 750,000, or 16%, were starter homes. AEI estimates that a national cap of 1,000 square feet on minimum lot sizes would have raised production by about 85%.
Source: HousingWire