ARBITRARY LINES
How Zoning Broke the American City and How To Fix It
by M. Nolan Gray
A study of zoning as an instrument of inequality—and deliberately so.
Former New York City planning official Gray examines the “arbitrary lines” that mark zoning maps. In most of the country’s major cities, he notes, the least desired sort of construction is apartment buildings, since these typically serve poorer communities, often made up of immigrants or ethnic minorities. Because deed covenants are no longer politically acceptable, zoning authorities hide behind “a dizzying array of confusing and pseudoscientific rules” that touch on such things as setbacks, floor area ratios, room size, and the like. So it has always been: Gray observes that the first discernible zoning laws were meant to impede Eastern European Jews from settling along New York’s Fifth Avenue. Modern zoning laws block not just the movements of people of color and of low income; they also stunt growth and innovation. Exclusionary rules make cities, which should be engines of innovation, unaffordable while immiserating the people who live there. Add to that the extraordinary requirements of many zoning laws about housing density and the location of shopping centers, and modern zoning condemns suburbanites to life in their cars. Examining the case of the zoning-free city of Houston, Gray convincingly presses the argument for rethinking and largely abandoning zoning laws as such, writing that these laws usually have only to do with “uses and densities on private land—nothing more, nothing less,” and are largely proscriptive and not prescriptive. Instead, the author urges that precedence be given to planning, which is a different thing entirely, and a planning system that allows for the interlayering of different kinds of housing and other properties that will help make housing more affordable and available and more ecologically sustainable—“green downtown apartments,” say, as opposed to “brown detached homes out on the edge of town.”
A welcome manifesto for rethought urban spaces and their outliers, bringing social justice into the discussion.