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
Good building culture may well arise organically if we let it. The “good” cultures of the past didn’t arise because of special codes; they arose over time because they were allowed and people liked them
I worry depending on form based “training wheels” will lead to overly prescriptive codes that don’t facilitate the building culture we want because our planning culture is even more broken.
I personally think that's what would happen eventually, but I do think that the transition would be... rough. My fear would be that if we just went from where we are now to total deregulation, the shock to the system and the projects that came out of it might provoke backlash to quickly put the old system back in place.
I'm not sure the answer, but I think "how do we transition from the old system to a better system" is potentially a *more important* question than "what should the new system be."
My suspicion is, like Andrew, that we would not politically tolerate the "roughness" and we have far more tools for ensuring conformance with central plan and neighborhood mores than in the past.
But i agree with you Andrew, that the form-based code are equally unlikely to be well drafted (or politically successful--either in mass or elite opinion).
Building culture also evolved before the car radically transformed transportation and created another stable equilibrium urban form which is much more spread out and unwalkable.
Architecture (and therefore also building codes, not just zoning) would need to go back to being something more distributed and vernacular. We would need many more people with hand and trade skills. (Far fewer people in your city today can make a window than 100 years ago).
And I am still impressed by the elite preference (I don't think it's just being cheap, it's a real aesthetic preference), particularly among developers, for "clean lines" and modernism. Despite a nearly unbroken 100 year reign of crappy modernist urbanism, some exceptional buildings not withstanding.
Yep. I’m for eliminating most zoning but requiring all construction to be to pre-WWII architectural standards. We need to bring back Deco, Nouveau, Italianate, Arts and Crafts styles, and with the same materials. There’s nothing worse than minimalism.
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.
Not snarky at all, it’s actually the right question. I think instead of zoning by category, we should be zoning by behavior. Like, how much noise does it generate at the property line? How much traffic? What’s the air quality impact, stormwater runoff, light spill, or even how late it stays active?
Those are all things you can measure and regulate without locking whole blocks into yes or no land use maps. Houston’s buffer zones kind of hinted at this, but we could do better by setting actual performance thresholds. For example, decibel limits after dark or trip counts on narrow streets. That gives more flexibility to people building smarter, cleaner places and less incentive to play zoning loophole games.
What you lay out here seems more realistic to me that much of what else I read. I'm sensitive to the difficulties measuring concepts like noise and light pollution on a daily basis practically….but you can accomplish it in a complaint driven, point in time measurement framework. But how do you do that from traffic generation? That is, perhaps, without requiring installation of trip counters at each driveway.
Yeah, traffic is the tricky one. I’ve run into this a lot in my work because even in high-end resort planning or mixed-use development, traffic generation always comes up. But the problem is it’s rarely about raw numbers, it’s about timing and context. Ten trips at 8am on a school street feel very different than twenty trips at 2pm on a commercial corridor.
I think complaint-driven, point-in-time checks still work here, paired with baseline data for certain use types. You don’t need a trip counter at every driveway, but if a new use starts generating unexpected congestion or safety complaints, you trigger a review. And maybe some areas could require a simple mobility impact checklist upfront, kind of like how we already do noise studies or drainage calcs.
The tech’s also catching up. Some cities are using camera-based sensors to estimate movement without full-on counters, which is more feasible than it sounds. But at the end of the day, I think if people feel empowered to report real disruptions and there’s a responsive system, you can handle most of the edge cases.
Japanese zoning (https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html) seems like an appealing improvement on US-style Euclidian zoning. The basic insight is that in Japan, uses are non-exclusive; rather than centrally dictating whether a zone will allow residential, industrial, or commercial use, broad categories of use are effectively ranked by the nuisance they would pose to residents, and the zoning designates the highest level of nuisance acceptable. So if a zone allows commercial uses, it also allows residences, schools, and smaller-scale neighborhood stores, but not factories or slaughterhouses.
There are some details that could be tweaked while keeping the overall concept; for example Japan's multiple residential zones could be consolidated to allow for more variety in housing. Though it's worth noting that even the lowest-density residential zones allow for low-rise apartments and townhouses and live-work buildings. There are also some innovations in height limits based on lot size that provide much more flexibility than FAR and allow for larger buildings.
Those of us who promoted and (when we could) practiced performance zoning were decades ahead of you and Gray. Which is fine. One of the things colleagues and I learned about performance zoning back in the 70s-80s is that everyone apparently has to learn it over again.
From a StrongTowns perspective, how do you limit development to the next increment without zoning? I strongly agree with your argument here, it just seems out of line with the incrementalist approach
In a world where no zoning was the norm, I expect incremental development would be too. In a world where zoning restrictions have helped cause under supply in many areas for decades, uncorking the genie in the bottle may have pretty dramatic effects, at least short term
Thank you for this! I’ve been dying for someone with a platform to point out that zoning is just central planning! It’s completely at odds with the institution of private property. If you have enough sense to see that governments do a poor job when they try to direct industry and commerce, you should recognize that empowering governments to decide how all land may be used will have equally bad results.
Of course, the most likely outcome of the end of zoning is a vast expansion of the suburbs, not their end. But YIMBYs have very diligently tried to associate specific regulatory repeals with the impossibly vague concept of "urbanism," such that many people believe the end of zoning will turn they American downtown into a mini Amsterdam, based on nothing.
Hey Freddie, I get what you're saying and as someone who grew up in the Houston area I sympathize to a degree. I've also witnessed with my own eyes that Houston is growing rapidly, and I've actually been shocked to see all the infill housing and new walkable townhome neighborhoods that didn't use to be there.
It's a far cry from Amsterdam, but also a big change from the ultra low rise pancake city that I remember from the 90's. But to your point, Houston is *huge* and outside the urban a core a lot of that is still classic sprawlsville, USA.
My main question is -- Houston is going to continue to grow in certain ways, and we can check in again in five years and see how things have gone relative to other American cities. What do you specifically expect things to look like there five years from now, and if it all goes how you expect, what is the biggest factor you think the YIMBYs will have missed?
The problem with your idea of regulating noise pollution directly is that it depends on police actually enforcing it. And police aren't going to respond to noise complaints in a city full of far more pressing demands for their response. I live in San Francisco and deal with this all the time.
In here you focus on the concept that we should focus on controlling the nuisance aspects of uses, but not the uses themselves. But in using Houston as an example, what you bullet out appears to be regulation of the uses in relation to other uses not their individual, potentially negative, "externalities".
"Slaughterhouses must be at least 3000 feet away from any church, park, school, hospital, or residence." Is this how Houston is regulating, because of so, it appears this is still regulating based on the use assuming nusiances that are inextricably linked to the use....rather than directly regulating the nuisance factors such as light, smell, pest attraction, etc.
Yep, Houston is mostly assigning spatial buffers to specific uses in order to regulate nuisances assumed to be inherent to those uses. As I noted at the end of the post, I’d like to city cities actually define the nuisance they want to regulate and let owners innovate with how to contain or mitigate that nuisance.
1) Houston's low housing costs seem to have more to do with TXDOT enabling it to sprawl; it hardly densified at all in the 2010s.
2) Performance based zoning is pretty rare today because its complex, standards are hard to develop, and monitoring/enforcement are expensive and require more capacity than most planning department care to spare.
I think it's interesting that you don't think it densified much -- actually I think it's a great thing, because if the stats say that a lot of new housing was built, but the vibe is that not much changed, that supports the perspective that incremental change can be big in aggregate without provoking backlash. I wrote more about that here: https://postsuburban.substack.com/p/abundant-incrementalism
No, I mean quite literally Houston didn't densify much in the 2000s. Its population weighed density increased 4%. Compare to tightly zoned DC (12%) or Seattle (32%)
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I suspect this is because Houston is so vast already compared to those cities with a lot of marginally developed land in city limits, and IIRC has continued at least some annexation, which would offset density increases in the center. I know the whole Montrose and Midtown areas feel (to me) a lot denser today than they did when I lived there 15 years ago, and I’ve read that Houston added something like 80k townhomes in that time period. I wonder what the data would look like if it was just for Houston inside the loop, or even inside the beltway.
But yes, to your original point, sprawl is part of the affordability story, not just in Houston but throughout the sunbelt.
As a fellow Houston-area-raised person I have to weigh in on this. A lot of my relatives live in Houston and in the places where the dense housing is being built it's just utterly unrecognizable from how it was in the 80's and 90's.
Houston is at the same time the quintessential sprawliest place in the USA, so I'm not surprised the stats are not picking up on it. But if you zoom in it's clearly happening, it's just got so far to go because the boundaries of what counts as "Houston" are so very wide.
To me the two systems seem pretty different in the implementation details, but they align to some degree philosophically in that both approaches are broadly permissive.
That said, we obviously see very different physical outcomes in Japan vs Houston, because zoning is only one part of the story.
One thing I think people don’t understand is that, while Houston is very permissive of land *use* is has not historically been very permissive of building *orientation,*. That is to say, Houston required everything to be car oriented, with large lots, big setbacks, and tons of parking, for a long time. So it was kind of like, you could build whatever you wanted, as long as it had a drive-through.
That’s changed a lot in the last 20-30 years, and you can really see it in the pre-war parts of town, but it’s not clear to me how much this matters in the majority of Houston that is post-war. I don’t know if it’s really possible to retrofit suburbia.
Interesting, so a lot of the parking was MANDATED? A classic rejoinder from YIMBY skeptics is “if abolishing zoning is all you need why didn’t Houston become dense a long time ago?” and that’s always struck me as a valid point that needs to be explained. So you’re saying that a lot of zoning-adjacent stuff has only been removed recently?
Correct. When I was doing real estate work there circa 2007-2012, it was really hard to make interesting townhome or apartment designs because you had to have two parking spaces per unit, and Houston has few alleys. So you see so many townhomes that are basically just a house on top of a garage, which, is fine as practical shelter goes but doesn’t cultivate the kind of walkable urbanism that a lot of people find desirable.
I think the point is more to respect your neighbors and their right to use their land responsibly than to delegate the fate of all land in the city to the political and bureaucratic machinery of city hall. I trust my neighbors more than I trust the planning department.
Also, if you don't trust developers, you probably don't want to give the planning department a giant set of arbitrary powers that gives them incentives to do special backroom deals with the select developers they happen to like, be related to, or that give them bribes.
Yes, but, then they have to pay for all that land. And if we were to *also* move to a Land Value Tax, then people who buy a whole bunch of land in order to keep other people away would be paying society a lot of money for the privilege (or just living far outside the city where it doesn't matter much). So long as we're regulating and/or pricing the externalities correctly, it's a good thing to let people pay for what they want.
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
Thanks Seth, totally agree. I have more thoughts coming on this :)
Good building culture may well arise organically if we let it. The “good” cultures of the past didn’t arise because of special codes; they arose over time because they were allowed and people liked them
I worry depending on form based “training wheels” will lead to overly prescriptive codes that don’t facilitate the building culture we want because our planning culture is even more broken.
I personally think that's what would happen eventually, but I do think that the transition would be... rough. My fear would be that if we just went from where we are now to total deregulation, the shock to the system and the projects that came out of it might provoke backlash to quickly put the old system back in place.
I'm not sure the answer, but I think "how do we transition from the old system to a better system" is potentially a *more important* question than "what should the new system be."
My suspicion is, like Andrew, that we would not politically tolerate the "roughness" and we have far more tools for ensuring conformance with central plan and neighborhood mores than in the past.
But i agree with you Andrew, that the form-based code are equally unlikely to be well drafted (or politically successful--either in mass or elite opinion).
Building culture also evolved before the car radically transformed transportation and created another stable equilibrium urban form which is much more spread out and unwalkable.
Architecture (and therefore also building codes, not just zoning) would need to go back to being something more distributed and vernacular. We would need many more people with hand and trade skills. (Far fewer people in your city today can make a window than 100 years ago).
And I am still impressed by the elite preference (I don't think it's just being cheap, it's a real aesthetic preference), particularly among developers, for "clean lines" and modernism. Despite a nearly unbroken 100 year reign of crappy modernist urbanism, some exceptional buildings not withstanding.
Yep. I’m for eliminating most zoning but requiring all construction to be to pre-WWII architectural standards. We need to bring back Deco, Nouveau, Italianate, Arts and Crafts styles, and with the same materials. There’s nothing worse than minimalism.
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.
This isn't snark... I promise...
What are the metrics for how things impact their surroundings?
Not snarky at all, it’s actually the right question. I think instead of zoning by category, we should be zoning by behavior. Like, how much noise does it generate at the property line? How much traffic? What’s the air quality impact, stormwater runoff, light spill, or even how late it stays active?
Those are all things you can measure and regulate without locking whole blocks into yes or no land use maps. Houston’s buffer zones kind of hinted at this, but we could do better by setting actual performance thresholds. For example, decibel limits after dark or trip counts on narrow streets. That gives more flexibility to people building smarter, cleaner places and less incentive to play zoning loophole games.
What you lay out here seems more realistic to me that much of what else I read. I'm sensitive to the difficulties measuring concepts like noise and light pollution on a daily basis practically….but you can accomplish it in a complaint driven, point in time measurement framework. But how do you do that from traffic generation? That is, perhaps, without requiring installation of trip counters at each driveway.
Yeah, traffic is the tricky one. I’ve run into this a lot in my work because even in high-end resort planning or mixed-use development, traffic generation always comes up. But the problem is it’s rarely about raw numbers, it’s about timing and context. Ten trips at 8am on a school street feel very different than twenty trips at 2pm on a commercial corridor.
I think complaint-driven, point-in-time checks still work here, paired with baseline data for certain use types. You don’t need a trip counter at every driveway, but if a new use starts generating unexpected congestion or safety complaints, you trigger a review. And maybe some areas could require a simple mobility impact checklist upfront, kind of like how we already do noise studies or drainage calcs.
The tech’s also catching up. Some cities are using camera-based sensors to estimate movement without full-on counters, which is more feasible than it sounds. But at the end of the day, I think if people feel empowered to report real disruptions and there’s a responsive system, you can handle most of the edge cases.
Thanks...I'll have to ponder on this some more!
I'm glad I could help you, if you have any questions you can PM me.
Japanese zoning (https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html) seems like an appealing improvement on US-style Euclidian zoning. The basic insight is that in Japan, uses are non-exclusive; rather than centrally dictating whether a zone will allow residential, industrial, or commercial use, broad categories of use are effectively ranked by the nuisance they would pose to residents, and the zoning designates the highest level of nuisance acceptable. So if a zone allows commercial uses, it also allows residences, schools, and smaller-scale neighborhood stores, but not factories or slaughterhouses.
There are some details that could be tweaked while keeping the overall concept; for example Japan's multiple residential zones could be consolidated to allow for more variety in housing. Though it's worth noting that even the lowest-density residential zones allow for low-rise apartments and townhouses and live-work buildings. There are also some innovations in height limits based on lot size that provide much more flexibility than FAR and allow for larger buildings.
Those of us who promoted and (when we could) practiced performance zoning were decades ahead of you and Gray. Which is fine. One of the things colleagues and I learned about performance zoning back in the 70s-80s is that everyone apparently has to learn it over again.
From a StrongTowns perspective, how do you limit development to the next increment without zoning? I strongly agree with your argument here, it just seems out of line with the incrementalist approach
In a world where no zoning was the norm, I expect incremental development would be too. In a world where zoning restrictions have helped cause under supply in many areas for decades, uncorking the genie in the bottle may have pretty dramatic effects, at least short term
Yep, I agree. I have an idea for a solution that I call "Adaptive Code," my goal is to get to that post this month🤞. I'm working my way up to it now.
Thank you for this! I’ve been dying for someone with a platform to point out that zoning is just central planning! It’s completely at odds with the institution of private property. If you have enough sense to see that governments do a poor job when they try to direct industry and commerce, you should recognize that empowering governments to decide how all land may be used will have equally bad results.
Of course, the most likely outcome of the end of zoning is a vast expansion of the suburbs, not their end. But YIMBYs have very diligently tried to associate specific regulatory repeals with the impossibly vague concept of "urbanism," such that many people believe the end of zoning will turn they American downtown into a mini Amsterdam, based on nothing.
Hey Freddie, I get what you're saying and as someone who grew up in the Houston area I sympathize to a degree. I've also witnessed with my own eyes that Houston is growing rapidly, and I've actually been shocked to see all the infill housing and new walkable townhome neighborhoods that didn't use to be there.
It's a far cry from Amsterdam, but also a big change from the ultra low rise pancake city that I remember from the 90's. But to your point, Houston is *huge* and outside the urban a core a lot of that is still classic sprawlsville, USA.
My main question is -- Houston is going to continue to grow in certain ways, and we can check in again in five years and see how things have gone relative to other American cities. What do you specifically expect things to look like there five years from now, and if it all goes how you expect, what is the biggest factor you think the YIMBYs will have missed?
The problem with your idea of regulating noise pollution directly is that it depends on police actually enforcing it. And police aren't going to respond to noise complaints in a city full of far more pressing demands for their response. I live in San Francisco and deal with this all the time.
In here you focus on the concept that we should focus on controlling the nuisance aspects of uses, but not the uses themselves. But in using Houston as an example, what you bullet out appears to be regulation of the uses in relation to other uses not their individual, potentially negative, "externalities".
"Slaughterhouses must be at least 3000 feet away from any church, park, school, hospital, or residence." Is this how Houston is regulating, because of so, it appears this is still regulating based on the use assuming nusiances that are inextricably linked to the use....rather than directly regulating the nuisance factors such as light, smell, pest attraction, etc.
Yep, Houston is mostly assigning spatial buffers to specific uses in order to regulate nuisances assumed to be inherent to those uses. As I noted at the end of the post, I’d like to city cities actually define the nuisance they want to regulate and let owners innovate with how to contain or mitigate that nuisance.
Do you have an example of what that would look like? Either in action now, or conceptualized?
Nice post. Two places I disagree:
1) Houston's low housing costs seem to have more to do with TXDOT enabling it to sprawl; it hardly densified at all in the 2010s.
2) Performance based zoning is pretty rare today because its complex, standards are hard to develop, and monitoring/enforcement are expensive and require more capacity than most planning department care to spare.
I tend to agree that performance based zoning seems ideal in theory but actually really hard to implement.
And less predictable to normal people. Everyone knows what a 300 ft setback is.
(Former zoning planner here)
FWIW there's been a lot of development inside the loop post 2007: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-and-everywhere-else-lot-size-matters
I think it's interesting that you don't think it densified much -- actually I think it's a great thing, because if the stats say that a lot of new housing was built, but the vibe is that not much changed, that supports the perspective that incremental change can be big in aggregate without provoking backlash. I wrote more about that here: https://postsuburban.substack.com/p/abundant-incrementalism
No, I mean quite literally Houston didn't densify much in the 2000s. Its population weighed density increased 4%. Compare to tightly zoned DC (12%) or Seattle (32%)
https://urbanstats.org/article.html?longname=Houston+%5BUrban+Area%5D%2C+TX%2C+USA&universe=North+America&s=2BmgQK3mRmvE62e5F
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I suspect this is because Houston is so vast already compared to those cities with a lot of marginally developed land in city limits, and IIRC has continued at least some annexation, which would offset density increases in the center. I know the whole Montrose and Midtown areas feel (to me) a lot denser today than they did when I lived there 15 years ago, and I’ve read that Houston added something like 80k townhomes in that time period. I wonder what the data would look like if it was just for Houston inside the loop, or even inside the beltway.
But yes, to your original point, sprawl is part of the affordability story, not just in Houston but throughout the sunbelt.
As a fellow Houston-area-raised person I have to weigh in on this. A lot of my relatives live in Houston and in the places where the dense housing is being built it's just utterly unrecognizable from how it was in the 80's and 90's.
Houston is at the same time the quintessential sprawliest place in the USA, so I'm not surprised the stats are not picking up on it. But if you zoom in it's clearly happening, it's just got so far to go because the boundaries of what counts as "Houston" are so very wide.
To what degree would you say that Houston's approach to Zoning is similar to Japanese zoning?
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
To me the two systems seem pretty different in the implementation details, but they align to some degree philosophically in that both approaches are broadly permissive.
That said, we obviously see very different physical outcomes in Japan vs Houston, because zoning is only one part of the story.
One thing I think people don’t understand is that, while Houston is very permissive of land *use* is has not historically been very permissive of building *orientation,*. That is to say, Houston required everything to be car oriented, with large lots, big setbacks, and tons of parking, for a long time. So it was kind of like, you could build whatever you wanted, as long as it had a drive-through.
That’s changed a lot in the last 20-30 years, and you can really see it in the pre-war parts of town, but it’s not clear to me how much this matters in the majority of Houston that is post-war. I don’t know if it’s really possible to retrofit suburbia.
Interesting, so a lot of the parking was MANDATED? A classic rejoinder from YIMBY skeptics is “if abolishing zoning is all you need why didn’t Houston become dense a long time ago?” and that’s always struck me as a valid point that needs to be explained. So you’re saying that a lot of zoning-adjacent stuff has only been removed recently?
Correct. When I was doing real estate work there circa 2007-2012, it was really hard to make interesting townhome or apartment designs because you had to have two parking spaces per unit, and Houston has few alleys. So you see so many townhomes that are basically just a house on top of a garage, which, is fine as practical shelter goes but doesn’t cultivate the kind of walkable urbanism that a lot of people find desirable.
So trust developers and not your neighbors. And the politicians benefiting too while you're at it. Sounds awesome.
I think the point is more to respect your neighbors and their right to use their land responsibly than to delegate the fate of all land in the city to the political and bureaucratic machinery of city hall. I trust my neighbors more than I trust the planning department.
Also, if you don't trust developers, you probably don't want to give the planning department a giant set of arbitrary powers that gives them incentives to do special backroom deals with the select developers they happen to like, be related to, or that give them bribes.
Yes, but, then they have to pay for all that land. And if we were to *also* move to a Land Value Tax, then people who buy a whole bunch of land in order to keep other people away would be paying society a lot of money for the privilege (or just living far outside the city where it doesn't matter much). So long as we're regulating and/or pricing the externalities correctly, it's a good thing to let people pay for what they want.