I recently went to a book Q&A for M. Nolan Gray’s new book on zoning, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. Actually, it’s not just about zoning; it’s about zoning abolition. Which is nowhere near as radical as it sounds after you read the book.

I highly recommend it—it’s apparently out of stock on Amazon but you can order it from the publisher. And if you’re on Twitter, give Gray a follow too.

A note on the publisher: it’s Island Press, which focuses on environmental and social issues from what I generally think of as a left-ish perspective. But Gray is more of a libertarian—his event was held by the Mercatus Center. Plus, it was held at Busboys and Poets, a socially conscious restaurant/bookstore locally famous for its politically-charged events, like anti-Iraq war talks in the early 2000s.

That’s all a microcosm of a larger point: zoning reform and housing are issues that scramble American politics in really interesting and potentially fruitful ways. “Everybody comes to the faith in different ways,” Gray said, noting his optimism about the political viability of zoning reform. Every political viewpoint can tell a story that gets you there: social and racial justice for progressives, property rights for libertarians, pro-family or pro-business themes for conservatives, for example (not to say that these concerns don’t overlap across the political spectrum).

One interesting question raised was what zoning will look like if/when it becomes a national issue in politics. Will that give it new energy? Or force it into partisan and culture war narratives, in contrast to the interesting coalitions it’s produced at the local and state levels? Food for thought.

Here’s the stage in a small theater-style room, with Gray on the right and moderator Jerusalem Demsas on the left, whose writing on housing issues is top-notch. Follow her too.

The crowd was overwhelmingly young—20s and 30s, like Gray and Demsas themselves. That’s true of the YIMBY (“Yes in my backyard”) movement overall, as the issue of housing affordability has become a problem not just for people towards the bottom of the income ladder, but increasingly everyone who isn’t rich. This is no longer just a “California problem,” he says.

You might think something like zoning is unbearably wonky and arcane, yet there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm in this room. It’s really interesting to see that. What’s more, Gray asked how many people in the room were actual urban planners, and only two or three people out of maybe 30 raised their hands. Against expectations, this stuff has become mainstream.

I took some notes throughout the Q&A and here they are below.

I’ll start with what I think was the money quote of the evening. Gray was talking about older folks in extremely expensive neighborhoods that were once middle class, and how these older residents will wonder why, for example, their children are leaving, and they feel lonely and isolated in their retirement years. “Their community has been destroyed by not allowing the built environment to change,” he said.

That’s a distillation of a really important point. “Neighborhood character” isn’t just the physical appearance of a place. It’s how that place functions: the social and economic relationships that actually turn it into a place. When you encase its physical appearance in amber, and treat built form as the sine qua non of character, you don’t preserve it; you squeeze out the things that actually give it life and character in the first place.

However, that doesn’t mean turning every place into “the big city.” In fact, Gray suggested that maybe the YIMBY movement shouldn’t be so closely aligned with the big city. A lot of zoning reforms could enhance suburbs without fundamentally changing them. For example, you could reduce minimum lot sizes, and produce more, and yes, somewhat smaller, detached single-family houses. (Take a look at the density of one of the original Levittowns, and compare it with a modern McMansion subdivision.)

He also notes that many of the most expensive neighborhoods in desirable metro areas, such as old streetcar suburbs, retain many urban features. These medium-density, mid-rise, relatively low-intensity places marry a lot of pros of suburbs and cities, yet they’re precisely the sort of thing zoning effectively bans in most of the United States. If somebody is worried about zoning reform producing weird, undesirable, chaotic places, point to these unselfconscious neighborhoods that most of us like.

Now, zoning isn’t the only thing that prohibits this. There are other factors—overly complicated environmental regulations, financing rules that make classic, small-scale urban development difficult, a dearth of small, hyperlocal developers versus large, by-the-book big ones—but Gray’s book is about zoning narrowly and properly understood, not most of the rest of land-use planning.

He suggests that without zoning, planners should play an even larger role in “stewarding the public realm.” And asked about typical concerns, like auto shops in residential subdivisions, he suggests that rational separation of uses will largely sort itself out. Pre-zoning, he points out, you still had commercial corridors, with non-residential uses in mostly residential areas generally pretty quiet and low-key: things like corner stores and unassuming home-based businesses, not things like garages and factories.

I played devil’s advocate during the audience Q&A period, and asked about the concern that zoning deregulation would lead to urbanist social engineering and “smart growth”—for the people for whom I was playing devil’s advocate, that’s a bad thing. Gray’s answer (and mine!) is that fundamentally, zoning reform is about “lifting a prohibition.” He added that we should not force density, any more than we should ban it. The whole point is to allow the housing market and land use more broadly to follow market demand rather than be beholden to a thicket of inflexible and complicated regulations.

This will get you some heat from the left-NIMBYs, people who see zoning reform and YIMBYism as a handout to developers or capitalism. Some of them mean it, and some use it as cover for actually not wanting any new development at all. But many pro-housing folks are also left-leaning city dwellers, so there’s an interesting intra-left split on this stuff that might also have implications for how it plays out politically.

A couple of other questions resulted in really great answers. One person asked about corruption in development and land use. I’m from New Jersey, and one of the first things you’ll hear when something is getting is built is that the developwer must be the mayor’s brother,

Houston put zoning to a referendum and it lost. Low income people of all races opposed it

"Identifying and measuring impacts" in a post-zoning world. Not just having hugely broad regulations.

Older zoning/planning literature (70s, 80s) talks about corruption a lot. When very little is allowed by right and almost everything is discretionary, you get corruption. "Certainty as to what is and is not allowed"



Bit about induced demand and how housing being priced eliminates most of that 

Related Reading:

Main Street Manufacturing

Three Generations of Separated Uses

What a Strip Mall Can Be

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