THE FWD #274 • 733 words

Pickleball’s meteoric rise and Virginia’s housing shortage are running into the same wall: not enough space zoned for the demand, and not enough patience from the neighbors who don’t want more of it next door.

Maybe you’re just hearing about it, or you’ve picked up a paddle yourself. Maybe you’re sick of listening to your coworkers talk about it. Either way, pickleball has taken the country by storm: Andre Agassi and LeBron James play it now, and one match got so heated in Florida this February that it ended in a “brawl.” The sport’s growth is running into the same land-use fights that shape housing, and it turns out pickleball has something to teach us about how we plan for both.

Pickleball is a useful stand-in for housing because it’s the fastest-growing sport in the United States, and it’s running into a version of the same problem housing is: too little supply for too much demand. Watching how communities have handled the scramble for court space is a decent preview of how they handle the scramble for housing, too.

Shared Demand

Adding supply is the priority for both, but supply alone isn’t the whole story. It has to be supply people can actually use and afford. That’s obviously true for housing, and it’s surprisingly true for pickleball, too.

Scarcity is what unites them. Accessible courts are in high demand, and communities across the country are adapting existing court space to meet it rather than building new ones from scratch. Repainting lines lets one tennis court double as two or four pickleball courts without touching the underlying land use at all — the recreational version of adding density without a new building permit.

That’s more or less the case for zoning reform, too. How a locality zones a parcel determines what can get built on it: allow a wider range of unit types on a given lot, and a single-family parcel can hold two, three, or four homes instead of one — the same way a single tennis court can hold four pickleball courts once the lines change. Accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and triplexes all do what court-sharing does for pickleball: they get more capacity out of the same footprint.

Both Take Careful Planning

Expanding pickleball courts to meet demand means planners, community members, and developers have to think about placemaking, not just paint. Communities everywhere are working to expand courts and businesses are popping up to meet the ever increasing popularity in the sport.

The American Planning Association argues that pickleball’s expansion needs the same zoning and community-development thinking as any other land-use decision. Done well, that planning heads off the noise complaints and disputes that come with putting courts too close to homes. The same logic applies to expanding housing supply and affordability: the earlier a community plans for it, the fewer fights it has later.

Growth Brings Friction

Fast growth brings friction with it. Pickleball is loud — a paddle hitting the ball can register 70 decibels from 100 feet away. Setting courts back 350 to 800 feet from homes can meaningfully cut the noise that reaches neighbors, but not every park has that kind of room to work with.

Housing runs into the identical dynamic. As infill and higher-density projects move forward, so does the pushback. NIMBY opposition — “not in my backyard” — can slow or kill developments, particularly multifamily or income-restricted projects proposed in established neighborhoods. Even a single new duplex can draw objections. Neighbors have gone to court over both pickleball courts and housing proposals alike.

Noise lawsuits have shuttered pickleball facilities that better upfront planning and permitting might have kept open. Housing entitlement fights carry a similar cost in a different currency: every year a rezoning or special-use permit spends under appeal is a year added to a project’s timeline, and a line item added to its price tag.

So here’s the answer to the title’s riddle: pickleball and housing both have a kitchen, and both only get more of them built when a community makes room before the demand shows up — not after the lawsuits start.