Rebekah Kik Is Using the Power of Local Government To Lift Barriers
A neighborhood planning session, with people analyzing different styles of housing. (Source: Imagine Kalamazoo 2025 Strategic Vision.)
To understand how one city leader can spearhead the housing reforms your city needs, look no further than Rebekah Kik, the deputy city manager for Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Kik began to notice the “broken teeth” pattern of vacancy in Kalamazoo’s neighborhoods 10 years ago, during her daily bike rides to work. There were no bike lanes back then, so she would weave through residential streets looking for safe routes. She began to wonder why there were so many empty lots. Why were there blocks without housing? Why was no one rebuilding homes on them?
She learned that the city’s efforts to fight blight and make way for new housing involved tearing buildings down. However, no one could build new homes to replace them because of prohibitive zoning rules.
Every empty lot represented one less home for residents and fewer resources for the city. Outside developers weren’t coming any time soon. Community members needed to be empowered to rebuild their neighborhoods themselves.
A city planner at the time, Kik began asking questions. How was the city partnering with neighborhoods? How could they incorporate community training or resources into those partnerships? What about preapproved plans? For the past 10 years, she has poured herself into answering these questions.
After a conversation with the mayor, Kik got to work. First, she pulled her planning team together to work on simple text amendments to the zoning code that would make building easier. Then she helped develop and advance a housing reform package in collaboration with state and county agencies, as well as partner organizations like the Incremental Development Alliance.
The reform package took five years to fully build out and activate. It legalized accessory dwelling units citywide, reduced parking minimums, and greatly reduced setback requirements and minimum lot sizes, among other reforms. It also included preapproved plans that small developers could adopt making it easier to start projects quickly instead of having to wait on various approvals. These plans were inspired by traditional American architecture already found in the neighborhood. In 2019, Kik launched a Housing Development Fund to help would-be small developers get projects off the ground by providing gap funding at an extremely low rate.
The work was more than technical policy-writing and ordinance-editing, though. It also involved engaging with the community about the changes that were being made and how they positively impacted residents. Like many cities, Kalamazoo residents had anxieties about zoning changes. However, through personal conversations at community meetings and office hours, Kik and her team were able to answer their questions and demonstrate how the community would benefit from the changes.
For city leaders who want to make changes but feel overwhelmed, or those who are worried about community response, Kik advises not trying to embrace major overhauls right away. “Just start with the next smallest thing.”
Kik suspects that going to architecture school rather than planning school made it easier to see zoning rules as “clay rather than stone,” meaning they can — and should — be changed if they aren’t serving the city well.
Her experience in architecture school gave her a deep love for the public realm and the traditional patterns of design that best serve human life and activity. These ideas sparked her work on housing, and they're also embedded in the Imagine Kalamazoo Masterplan, which she wrote. The master plan includes basic people-centered initiatives, such as better connected sidewalks and repaired potholes, but it also includes more aspirational projects like more parks with splash pads and safe routes to school in every neighborhood.
Ultimately, when it comes to housing reform, Kik’s goal is to “see our community building the community.” She wants to empower local small-scale builders to build the housing and businesses that the city needs to be more resilient. So far, they’ve welcomed 48 new homes and have about 12 local builders interested in building more.
Kik knows that taking this localist approach is the best way to strengthen the city she grew up in and the city she now calls home — although she didn’t always expect to take it, after a stunning educational and professional journey that took her to London, New York, Paris, Rome and Switzerland, working alongside experts like Ian Lockwood and Dan Burden. When the job opportunity opened up back at home, it took her a minute to process it. Then she realized that, while she had learned and seen so much good urbanism in the world, “this was a chance to actually do something.”
She remembers when the first house went up on an empty lot in the summer of 2019. Even though most people had no idea how much work had gone into making the home possible, Kik stood there with a huge sense of accomplishment and hope: “It just made my heart so much lighter, lifting the weight of that huge barrier.”
This Thursday, February 27, Strong Towns will release a toolkit on regulatory reform, offering practical steps for updating local approval processes and making cities more housing ready. If you become a member, we'll send you an invitation to a launch livestream where Chuck will give an inside look at the toolkit with housing experts Alli Thurmond Quinlan and Eric Kronberg.
In the meantime, click here to get a sneak peek at the toolkit and take a quiz to see if your city is ready to welcome more housing. If it is, add it to our map of Housing-Ready Cities!
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.