The Case for Abolishing Zoning.

• Author: Henderson, David R.
• Position: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

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

By M. Nolan Gray 240 pp.; Island Press, 2022

"Zoning is not a good institution gone bad.... On the contrary, zoning is a mechanism of exclusion designed to inflate property values, slow the pace of new development, segregate cities by race and class, and enshrine the detached single-family house as the exclusive urban ideal." So writes M. Nolan Gray in

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

This quote is a strong condemnation of zoning. Does Gray, a scholar affiliated with the Mercatus Center, successfully make his case? He does. I confess that I was somewhat convinced of this before cracking the book. Decades ago, I read a 77-page article by legal scholar Bernard Siegan who made the case that Houston, the one major city in America that has avoided zoning, was doing well. Gray is quite familiar with Houston and, indeed, devotes a whole chapter to laying out in what ways it does well.

Gray does much more than discuss Houston. He delves into the history of zoning, which began about a century ago, to show that the racial and class segregation it creates and the property values it inflates are not accidental byproducts of a well-intentioned process gone wrong. They are, instead, what the early proponents of zoning intended. To put it in the current vernacular, for the early proponents of zoning, these bad effects are a feature, not a bug. Gray makes a strong case for making zoning less bad and a further strong case for ending it. Unfortunately, he also recommends that local governments impose price controls on a portion of new housing stock.

Excluding the wrong sort / Early in the book, Gray makes an important distinction between zoning and city planning. He learned that distinction on the job. As a city planner in New York, he had been required to work on the zoning help desk for at least one day a month, answering public questions about the city's regulations. The main thing he learned was that "most people don't know the first thing about zoning." But he knows a lot about it and gives a nice summary of what it is.

Zoning, he writes, "regulates uses and densities on private land--nothing more, nothing less. It works principally by what it prevents rather than by what it causes." Zoners decide whether agiven area of a town or city should be zoned for residential, commercial, or industrial usage. They often zone residential areas as "R-l,"...