Property and Freedom: The Constitution, the Courts, and Land-Use Regulation.

• Author: Husock, Howard

By Bernard H. Siegan

New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997. Pp. 275. $34.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Some years ago, I was asked by the editor of a regional magazine in New England to research a small piece of social history, that of a single, older house in Boston and all the families who had ever lived in it. The assignment turned out to be a captivating one for a number of reasons. The house I chose turned out to have been caught in successive waves of socioeconomic and ethnic change in ways that made those perennial dynamics of urban neighborhoods come to life.

Among the most significant revelations to emerge from the research about that one house in the city's Dorchester district was how the small neighborhood around it had been shaped in the mid- to late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Developers seeking to create an upper-middle-class enclave on Mount Bowdoin, a hill south of the central city, used a wide range of devices. Deeds included prohibitions against "grog shops" and industrial uses. Once the homes were built, neighbors formed private associations to develop a neighborhood "reading room"--a private library. When one house became a neighborhood nuisance, the same neighbors' group purchased it and devised ways to recruit a respectable buyer. All of which meant that, in an era before professional urban planners and the municipal power to specify which sorts of buildings should be built where--the power called zoning--cities had ways to manage rather well. Private agreements and voluntary associations combined to create pleasant residential districts and quasi-public amenities.

Obviously, then, the virtual ubiquity of zoning in American cities, suburbs, and even developing rural areas does not necessarily imply that without it the places in which we live would be a chaotic mishmash of dreaded "mixed uses." There is even reason to believe that cities organized differently might provide better for their residents. That idea has been among the central propositions espoused by the distinguished University of San Diego law professor Bernard Siegan, both in his classic 1972 book Land Use without Zoning and now, again, in his latest work, Property and Freedom: The Constitution, the Courts, and Land-Use Regulation.

In his new book Siegan builds on his earlier work, which sketched the ways and means by which complex metropolitan areas can function without zoning, using the still-unzoned Houston as his case in...