We don’t need zoning
Cities shouldn’t micromanage their economies
Sometimes a post can be reduced to a sentence or two; this is one of those posts.
We should abolish Euclidean Zoning. It has few benefits, enormous costs, and cities work just fine without it.
That’s the BLUF (or if you’re a snarky internet type, the TLDR). I’ll slightly expand this argument below.
One point of emphasis: zoning ordinances can encompass many things, but in this post I’m focused on land use control, meaning the regulation of which activities are allowed to happen on which properties. I’ll cover other concerns that are often part of zoning ordinances (lot sizes, unit restrictions, building heights, etc.) another time.
Where zoning came from
Popular mythology suggests that zoning was established to keep nuisances out of neighborhoods, and the very earliest zoning regulations did start along those lines, limiting the shadows cast by skyscrapers in New York, and restricting heavy industry in Los Angeles. But from the beginning zoning was also about “protecting” neighborhoods from a different kind of nuisance — other people. As
recently wrote, all zoning is exclusionary.Since this has been written about at great length already, I won’t repeat all the arguments. Suffice it to say, the basis of modern zoning is “I don’t like the kind of people who live in apartments and I don’t want them near me.” I think that’s anti-democratic, un-American, and certainly not the role of the government. Saying it out loud is enough to recognize how much that mindset goes against our cultural values today, and is enough reason for us to look for an alternative.
But just in case the moral argument doesn’t move you, consider the economic argument. Zoning is central planning of the economy via bureaucratic determination of what property owners can do on their property. And central planning is bad! It replaces the unique power of markets to create abundance with a sluggish system that can’t adapt. It amazes me that we Americans utilize almost Soviet levels of central planning for our built environment and then are surprised that we have housing shortages.
Target the actual problem
Recall our goal for beneficial regulation: minimize negative externalities and maximize positive externalities.
So what should we do about nuisances — aka externalities? Instead of trying to micromanage the local economy, cities should regulate externalities directly.
Houston’s approach is the model here. No system is perfect, but Houston’s system is proven to work at the largest scale and with the fastest growth of any city in the US, maintaining broader affordability and better upward mobility than most.
In Houston, land use is not pre-determined on a map, but uses known to generate conflicts or harms are spatially restricted. A few examples:
Alcohol sales are not allowed within 300 feet of childcare centers, schools, churches, or hospitals. (Said institutions can also apply for a larger buffer of up to 1000 feet.)
Gun ranges are not allowed within 300 feet of any street or building.
Slaughterhouses must be at least 3000 feet away from any church, park, school, hospital, or residence.
Bungee Cord Jumping is prohibited citywide. (Like I said, no code is perfect!)
These examples illustrate several reasonable cases for spatial restriction of business. Houstonians don’t want adult-oriented businesses right next to education and health facilities. They want a big buffer zone around any gun range. They don’t want slaughterhouses near anything. And they don’t think Bungee Jumping is cool at all.
What happens in practice in Houston is that spatially restricted activities are established away from other development, and then naturally cluster together, with buffers between the nuisance uses and residential and institutional activities.
As I said up front, no code is perfect. Houston relies on spatial restriction of externalities on the assumption that a spatial buffer will counter the noise, smell, or danger of the restricted activity. That seems to work, but it’s still a bit arbitrary.
I’d like to see cities innovate with better performance standards, focusing on limiting noise, emissions, and other hazards directly. Then spatial buffers would be one possible solution, but better buildings that fully contain the externality would be another possibility. Targeting the thing we really care about allows more flexibility and innovation, and will hold up better into the future as technology changes.
Conclusion
A decade ago, I would have felt that this topic needed many essays to unpack and explain, but fortunately that hard work has already been done. You can get almost this same argument but in book-length and depth from
’s Arbitrary Lines. As a human with an ego I’d like to point out that I independently arrived at mostly the same observations and conclusions as Nolan before he published his book… but Nolan did us all a great service and actually wrote the book, while I did not! So if you want to go much deeper on this topic, go read Nolan’s book, I highly recommend it.
I'm mostly with you, and especially where use regulations are concerned. There is too much dissecting the number of angels on the head of a pin.
BUT-- Where I am a little cautious, is that without zoning we will get worse urbanism in most places from most developers because they have mostly forgotten the development culture that applied when we built our good cities. For some of us, it would make our good projects easier. But we will need a new culture of city building, and I can sometimes talk myself into believing that we could use form-based codes as a sort of training wheels.
No zoning can make a bad building culture build well, and a good building culture doesn't need zoning
I agree that land-use micromanagement creates more distortion than order. What we often call “planning” has turned into a defensive architecture of exclusion, and the economic damage is no longer theoretical.
But here’s the real opportunity: moving from control to accountability. Instead of saying where things can or can’t happen, we should be demanding how they impact their surroundings. The future of zoning isn’t in static maps,it’s in dynamic performance standards. Houston scratched the surface. We can go further.