Annotated Table of Contents - Arbitrary Lines

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

By M. Nolan Gray

Introduction Part I While Part II surveys well-established critiques of zoning and Part III sets out a novel argument for moving beyond zoning, Part I aims to be a straightforward study of zoning’s origins and workings. In this sense, it’s uniquely well suited to use in the classroom.

Chapter 1: Where Zoning Comes From While we take zoning for granted today, zoning as a policy framework is barely 100 years old. This chapter provides a brief and accessible history of zoning: • How did land-use regulation work before zoning?

• How were cities changing in the early twentieth century?

• Where (and why) was zoning first adopted?

• What was the role of the federal government in spreading zoning?

To answer the first two questions, this chapter explores concepts like the difference between planning and zoning, as well as the role of technology in shaping urban growth. To answer the second two questions, this chapter compares the two important zoning ordinances adopted in 1916—in New York City and Berkeley—and examines the impact of the Standard Zoning Enabling Act.

Chapter 2: How Zoning Works Despite popular interest in zoning, many have only a faint idea of what it is or how it works. This chapter fills this gap by explaining how cities adopt zoning, the important roles played by the zoning ordinance and map, and how things like rezonings or text

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amendments can change zoning. It also goes into detail on the two pillars of zoning regulation—use segregation and density regulation—and unpacks opaque concepts like use districts, floor area ratios, and setbacks. A final section considers recent innovations in zoning, such as overlay districts and form-based codes.

Part II This section of the book surveys four contemporary critiques of zoning: that it raises housing costs, blocks mobility into high productivity regions, entrenches racial and class-based segregation, and forces cities to take a sprawling and unsustainable form.

Each chapter is heavily rooted in the current and ongoing academic research on the subject in question.

Chapter 3: Planning an Affordability Crisis Housing affordability is now the top issue in cities across the country. But how did it get so bad? And what role does zoning play? This chapter explores three mechanisms by which zoning raises housing prices: First, by limiting the overall supply of housing.

For example, single-family zoning currently bans apartments outright in well over 90 percent of all residential areas in most US cities. Second, by raising the cost of that housing that is built. Consider minimum parking requirements, which can easily add up to $50,000 to the price of a home. Finally, by subjecting housing to a long, unpredictable, and costly discretionary review process. A final section unpacks the “homevoter hypothesis” to explain the politics that underwrite this system.

Chapter 4: The Wealth We Lost The housing affordability crisis has gone national, but it has long been most acute in the Northeast and on the West Coast—that is to say, in some of our most productive regions. To the extent that this disincentives Americans to move to productive cities like San Francisco and Boston, this has made America collectively poorer, less innovative, and more unequal. This chapter explores basic themes in urban economics—namely, agglomeration benefits—that make cities so central to human flourishing, as well as the constraints that contemporary zoning places on their growth. Specifically, this chapter surveys recent research measuring the economic cost of zoning restraints in a handful of “superstar” cities.

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Chapter 5: Apartheid by Another Name Over 50 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, America remains a profoundly segregated place. This is especially true of our cities, as the Black Lives Matter movement reminded us in 2020. This chapter explores the role of zoning in segregating US cities based on race and class, both in a historical and contemporary context. Segregation was often an open objective of early codes, and to this day, cities continue to use zoning to segregate communities based on class. When combined with policies like discriminatory lending, inequitable public investments, and suburbanization, zoning served as the keystone policy in keeping Americans separated.

A final section considers the deep social costs of these policies.

Chapter 6: Sprawl by Design Contrary to popular misconception, cities are arguably one of humanity’s greenest inventions, sparing natural land and saving energy. And yet, zoning does everything it can to make cities sprawling and auto oriented. Amid the emerging consensus on climate change, this status quo deserves a critical reevaluation. This chapter takes up that mantle by deconstructing the rules that force cities to gobble up more natural and agricultural land—such as minimum lot sizes—and write auto-dependence into law— such as strict use segregation. A final section reflects on how growth controls in California alone are driving many hundreds of thousands of Americans out of temperate coastal climates and into harsh desert climates where their energy consumption will increase, to the detriment of our planet.

Part III This third and final section considers ways to improve zoning, including what a better system of land-use planning might look like after zoning. To the extent this section is charting out new territory, it should be especially generative for students, researchers, and practitioners.

Chapter 7: Toward a Less Bad Zoning Over the past half-decade, the YIMBY movement has transformed the discourse surrounding zoning. This chapter considers some of the reform efforts underway. At the local level, municipal governments have it within their power to end single-family zoning, abolish minimum parking requirements, eliminate or lower minimum lot size and floor area regulations, and decriminalize inherently affordable housing typologies.

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At the state level, policymakers can and should set up guardrails to rein in exclusionary practices. And the federal government should do what it can to incentivize local zoning reform. A final section considers what we might learn from how other countries—such as Japan—manage zoning.

Chapter 8: The Case for Abolishing Zoning We can do better than reform. After all, zoning isn’t a good policy gone bad—it’s an inherently flawed policy, pursuing objectives that many today would find objectionable. The trouble with zoning reform is that absent deeper reform—such as changes to tax policy that disincentivize treating homes like an investment or the extreme fragmentation of local government—it will always drift back toward the dysfunctional status quo. After “steelmanning” zoning, this chapter posits that zoning has failed as a system of regulating urban growth: it has done a bad job of separating incompatible uses—often simply offloading these uses onto the poor—and has actively undermined broader efforts at growth management.

Chapter 9: The Great Unzoned City Houston is America’s fourth largest city. And while it made many other planning mistakes over the twentieth century, it never adopted zoning. As a result, the Bayou City is now one of the most diverse, affordable, and fastest growing cities in the country. But why didn’t Houston adopt zoning? And if not through zoning, how does the city regulate growth? This chapter covers the history of how Houston voters rejected zoning across three referenda, explains how a mix of well-targeted nuisance regulations and natural use segregation keeps the city working, and unpacks Houston’s unique system of deed restrictions. It concludes with an actionable plan for abolishing zoning that draws on the Houston experience.

Chapter 10: Planning After Zoning Abolishing zoning wouldn’t mean the end of city planning—on the contrary, it would give city planning a new lease on life. Now more than ever, we need planners to regulate nuisances and serve as mediators among neighbors, to support desegregation and minimize displacement, and to plan out streets and protect sensitive natural areas.

Today, planners spend far too much of their time trying to keep fourplexes out of culde-sacs and micromanage the minor details of strip malls, but it doesn’t have to be this way. A new generation of cities like Bastrop, Texas—which combines relatively light

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land-use regulations with a revival of the street grid—could show us the way to a postzoning future for city planning.

Conclusion Appendix: What Zoning Isn’t This appendix details where zoning fits into the broader ecosystem of policies and forces that shape our cities. It explains how market forces—specifically land prices— naturally guide densities and uses into locations. It also distinguishes zoning from other similar forms of land-use regulation, such as nuisance regulations or historic preservation. More broadly, this chapter illustrates how zoning is only a small—and easily separable—part of the contemporary city planning framework.

Suggested Complementary or cited reading • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth T. Jackson Zoned American by Seymour Toll The Zoning of America by Michael Allan Wolf Zoned in the USA by Sonia Hirt The Complete Guide to Zoning by Dwight H. Merriam Zoning Rules! by William A. Fischel The Rent Is Too Damn High by Matthew Yglesias Neighborhood Defenders by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup The Gated City by Ryan Avent Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein Segregation by Design by Jessica Trounstine Snob Zones by Lisa Prevost Green Metropolis by David Owen The Environmental Protection Hustle by Bernard J. Frieden Zoned Out by Jonathan Levine Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty A Better Way to Zone by Donald L. Elliot The Affordable City by Shane Phillips The Politics of Zoning by Stanislaw J. Makielski Jr. 5

• • • • • • • • •

The Zoning Game by Richard Babcock The Death and Life of the Great American City by Jane Jacobs Land Use without Zoning by Bernard H. Siegan Order without Law by Robert Ellickson Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government by Robert Nelson Order without Design by Alain Bertaud Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities by Michael Southworth and Eran BenJoseph Urban Economics by Jan Brueckner The Citizen’s Guide to Planning by Christopher Duerksen, Gregory Dale, and Donald Elliot

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