The Delaware State Housing Authority tapped eight municipalities and Sussex County to receive free technical assistance to modernize zoning and land use regulations.
The program’s end goal is to increase the affordable housing supply, but representatives from each jurisdiction selected the ways they’ll tackle that problem. The selected locales have been partnered with consultants and have access to technical support from DSHA.
DSHA Director Matthew Heckles said Delaware is about 40 thousand housing units short.
“These are just smart growth, smart housing supply development concepts that we're asking them to consider as they build out the changes in zoning that are going to be right for their towns and the county,” Heckles said.
The General Assembly created the Zoning and Land Use Reform Pilot Program to rework regulations enabling the housing shortage and affordability crisis. DSHA announced Bridgeville, Dover, Georgetown, Laurel, Lewes, Milford, Newark, Rehoboth Beach and Sussex County will move forward with the program.
Participation in the program is free for the selected municipalities and county and funded by the DSHA.
Jurisdiction representatives voted to move forward with reform strategies like increasing allowable density and building heights to allow for multifamily housing.
Heckles said one of the program’s goals is to supply “missing middle” housing, which includes duplexes and townhomes. They are multiunit structures that diversify an area’s housing market.
This type of housing is called the missing middle because zoning laws that only permit single-family housing and have building requirements that are difficult to meet, according to the National League of Cities.
“Thus, many of the existing middle housing stock was built in the 1920s and 1930s and is experiencing a decline in quality, safety and accessibility,” according to a 2024 article from the NLC.
New building in Delaware has largely prioritized single-family housing as well.
“What we've built in Delaware over the past several decades is housing that's too big and too spread out,” Heckles said. “And it’s really just serving retirees from Maryland and New Jersey and Pennsylvania to live in eastern Sussex County… We're not building for the families that are kind of forming here in Delaware, and have moderate incomes.”
Heckles said that’s partially because restrictive zoning laws make it more difficult to build houses that aren’t for single families.
The General Assembly allocated funding to the DSHA for housing supply initiatives. Heckles said the DSHA is spending several hundred thousand dollars to bring in three technical assistance providers.
Heckles said ordinances developed in this program could very well be mimicked by other municipalities in the future if they succeed.
