courtesy Shane Sarnac
Audio By Carbonatix
Are you financially resilient? If you lost your job tomorrow, how long would it take for you to face the threat of losing your home? In this time of expensive groceries, high rent, unattainable home-ownership costs and general uncertainty about the future, most of us wouldn’t last long. In the last few months of 2025, the Lakewood City Council passed a new zoning code that has the potential to be a game-changer for helping residents like me build financial resiliency.
Those updates are headed to the ballot in April and are at risk of being blocked.
Towards the end of the pandemic, a friend and I purchased a four-bedroom, split-level home together with the explicit goal of sharing expenses across his family and mine so that we could have the benefits of home ownership — having a garden, a place for a workshop, and space that we can customize to meet our needs — without the massive financial risks of doing so on our own. Since buying the house together, we each got married; he lives in the upper level with his wife, and I live in the basement level with mine, with just a sliding barn door separating us to keep my dogs from terrorizing his cats.
Our home is zoned R1-6 in the current zoning code, meaning that the house can only be used for a single family. I don’t know what defines a “family” in this area of the law, but I can tell you that we’ve had no issues with our neighbors, and our arrangement has allowed us to achieve things in life that we probably could not have otherwise. In addition to us all being able to save for the future, my friend’s wife was able to complete medical school and my wife was able to get her master’s degree in theater education and pursue an acting career. That was all made possible due to our shared home-ownership arrangement in what was functionally a duplex.
My wife and I now want to grow our family, and we’d like to formalize our duplex so that we can buy out my friend, take on official tenants, and continue living here without losing that financial security. Under the current zoning code, there isn’t even a process where I can ask for permission to turn our house into a true duplex — it’s simply not allowed.
I’ve seen the “Don’t Bulldoze our Neighborhood” signs; I know there are people spreading misinformation about the new zoning code. The fact is, nothing about the new zoning code would lead to the bulldozing of neighborhoods. The code updates just increase flexibility in how small residential structures can be used.
The new zoning code is form-based instead of use-based, so without any externally visible changes to my existing house, we could easily turn it into a much more secure and livable space for my soon-to-be growing family. If anything, the new zoning code overprotects the existing fabric of our neighborhoods by enforcing rules that ensure buildings only take up a maximum of 50 percent of the lot and meet strict size and height restrictions that are essentially not changing in the new code.
The new code simply allows owners to use their land in ways that give them more options to meet their needs without disrupting those around them. Are you an empty nester with a couple spare bedrooms? Convert them into a small apartment. Are your kids looking for somewhere to live while they get started in life, but don’t want to directly share space with you? Convert your garage into a separate living area for them.
Ultimately, what the new zoning code gives us is choice. It gives us the ability to decide our own future and find ways to adapt to an ever-more chaotic world. It won’t solve the housing shortages, but it will allow homeowners to create the kind of homes that currently don’t exist, resulting in a wider range of available spaces to live in at a larger range of price points. Just as sharing my home with my friend allowed me to save enough to potentially buy him out, this added housing flexibility can help others to save so that they can also become homeowners.
I am the primary earner in my family, but as a software engineer, I’m not sure my job will garner the same wages in five years, or if it will even exist due to AI. I don’t want to put my family in the position of possibly losing our home if my pay is cut or if my job is lost. The crux of it is this: I want my family to be resilient in the face of economic insecurity. I want the financial flexibility to survive if AI takes my job or if I leave it to start a business or to simply stay home with my kids. I want to stay in Lakewood, but if the new zoning code is repealed, I won’t have a choice but to look elsewhere.
If you value empowering people to achieve higher levels of financial security, while also creating more housing options without changing what makes Lakewood so attractive to live in, vote in the upcoming special election to keep the new zoning code.
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