Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

Abstract

Long gone are the times when zoning seemed a subject fit for a narrow circle of experts. In the last decade or so, several noteworthy books on zoning have been published, alongside dozens, if not hundreds, of articles in America’s most august news outlets and thousands of social media posts and blogs. One major city after another—Miami (FL), Denver (CO), Minneapolis (MN)—has significantly revised their zoning ordinances, and states such as California and Oregon have initiated ambitious reforms as well. Zoning, dare we say, is becoming a fashionable topic of conversation even at the dinner table, and for a good reason: zoning has always been a deeply political and therefore debatable project but one that has artfully paraded as a mere technical tool. The purpose of M. Nolan Gray’s Arbitrary Lines is to show that zoning, which was invented more than a century ago to better our cities, improve living conditions, and reduce health hazards stemming from the coexistence of housing and polluting industry, has devolved into an arcane system of spatial division that seems to worsen the very problems its founders hoped to solve. Arbitrary Lines is a comprehensive, wellgrounded, and logically organized critique of the rigid and indeed arbitrary way in which Euclidean zoning structures our communities and shapes our lives. Elegantly written, concise, and witty, Gray’s book is a useful introduction to zoning’s history and current state, to its lofty original promises and its many current shortcomings. If you live outside the world of professional architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners and yet you wonder why our cities are built the way they are and if, further, you have time to read one book on the subject, Arbitrary Lines, with its engaging writing style, may well top your list. Although the quality and accessibility of prose is the book’s most admirable quality, most of the points that it so eloquently brings up are both valid and well known. Arbitrary Lines would work well as a reference for practitioners, citizens, and students who are relatively new to the subject. But its chief arguments have already been covered elsewhere in greater historical and theoretical depth. There is near-consensus in professional circles that how we have practiced zoning in the United States for a century contributes to sprawl, inflates housing prices, and serves as a tool of social and racial segregation and discrimination. Arbitrary Lines augments and enlivens these arguments, but it does not appear to bring many new ones. Here and there, the author appears to claim discovery, but the details are ambiguous. For example, we are told that if there is another zoning system in the world to learn from, “it’s the Japanese” (p. 122). Yet cities in other countries zone quite similarly to Japan, so it is not clear why only that example is highlighted. The book’s most provocative argument is that U.S. zoning is so compromised that it should be abolished altogether (pp. 127–142). In our modest view, this may be an overstatement. Zoning is a type of land use regulation that amounts to dividing land into districts and attaching separate building rules to each, as Nolan explains. The rules are typically written by the public (municipal) sector and applied to the private sector, and the zones are typically demarcated to follow private property lines, making them perhaps a bit less arbitrary than the book title suggests. Yet zoning is neither good nor bad in itself: It is what we have made it to be. We could strive for better zoning, as was argued by Elliott (2008), among many others, in another well-written and pragmatic book published by the same press. We could also potentially learn from the original, early 20thcentury proposals for zoning, which did not envision large districts containing a single land use. On the contrary, they divided cities into small, fine-grained districts where mixed land uses and mixed housing types could occur through proximity. The original “zonists” talked about residential streets, commercial streets, and light industry streets, all of which were to be contained in the same city block. What if much of what’s wrong with American zoning today is the scale of the district to which it is applied? The rumors of zoning’s funeral have been exaggerated a few times already. We clearly need a land use regulatory system that fits our contemporary values and lifestyles better than Euclidean zoning. Nolan has brought admirable fresh energy to this discussion. We both would be happy to use his book in class.