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The conversation about zoning has meandered its way through issues
ranging from housing affordability to economic growth to
segregation, expanding in the process from a public policy
backwater to one of the most discussed policy issues of the day. In
his pioneering 1972 study, Land Use Without Zoning, Bernard Siegan
first set out what has today emerged as a common-sense perspective:
Zoning not only fails to achieve its stated ends of ordering urban
growth and separating incompatible uses, but also drives housing
costs up and competition down. In no uncertain terms, Siegan
concludes, "Zoning has been a failure and should be eliminated!"
Drawing on the unique example of Houston-America's fourth largest
city, and its lone dissenter on zoning-Siegan demonstrates how land
use will naturally regulate itself in a nonzoned environment. For
the most part, Siegan says, markets in Houston manage growth and
separate incompatible uses not from the top down, like most zoning
regimes, but from the bottom up. This approach yields a result that
sets Houston apart from zoned cities: its greater availability of
multifamily housing. Indeed, it would seem that the main
contribution of zoning is to limit housing production while adding
an element of permit chaos to the process. Land Use Without Zoning
reports in detail the effects of current exclusionary zoning
practices and outlines the benefits that would accrue to cities
that forgo municipally imposed zoning laws. Yet the book's program
isn't merely destructive: beyond a critique of zoning, Siegan sets
out a bold new vision for how land-use regulation might work in the
United States. Released nearly a half century after the book's
initial publication, this new edition recontextualizes Siegan's
work for our current housing affordability challenes. It includes a
new preface by law professor David Schleicher, which explains the
book's role as a foundational text in the law and economics of
urban land use and describes how it has informed more recent
scholarship. Additionally, it includes a new afterword by urban
planner Nolan Gray, which includes new data on Houston's evolution
and land use relative to its peer cities.
What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to
addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and
innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and
car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond
zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How
Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively
explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a
necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more
affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The
arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to
dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a
pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news
is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air,
with cities and states across the country critically re-evaluating
zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Durham, and Hartford,
the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being
scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking
requirements disappearing altogether. Some American
cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest
city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In
Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause
by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American
cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary
critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently
underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might
work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest,
no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular
audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how
zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about
urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a
new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and
sustainable American city.
This volume explores, both in theory and in practice, what "social
coordination" is and how public policies can help or hinder the
processes of social coordination. In particular, these chapters
examine the institutional incentives that motivate public policy
decisions and their implementation to achieve specific individual
and social goals. Some chapters in this volume are more
theoretical, applying insights from the Austrian, Virginia, and
Bloomington schools of political economy to public policy issues.
Other chapters are more practical, exploring the broader
implications of these theories to real-world public policy puzzles.
Authored by individuals from a variety of disciplines with diverse
interests in public policy, this work includes discussions of
topics such as environmental policy, housing policy, and education
policy, among others. A unifying theme across the chapters is that
policymakers often advise one-size-fits-all solutions to
complicated public policy questions but ignore the multitude of
incentives faced by the "players of the game" and the subsequent
development of diverse forms of social coordination. Social
coordination is often left out public policy analysis but is
crucial to the success of informal and formal institutional
arrangements. The chapters aim to disentangle these issues of
social coordination in public policy in theory and practice.
The conversation about zoning has meandered its way through issues
ranging from housing affordability to economic growth to
segregation, expanding in the process from a public policy
backwater to one of the most discussed policy issues of the day. In
his pioneering 1972 study, Land Use Without Zoning, Bernard Siegan
first set out what has today emerged as a common-sense perspective:
Zoning not only fails to achieve its stated ends of ordering urban
growth and separating incompatible uses, but also drives housing
costs up and competition down. In no uncertain terms, Siegan
concludes, "Zoning has been a failure and should be eliminated!"
Drawing on the unique example of Houston-America's fourth largest
city, and its lone dissenter on zoning-Siegan demonstrates how land
use will naturally regulate itself in a nonzoned environment. For
the most part, Siegan says, markets in Houston manage growth and
separate incompatible uses not from the top down, like most zoning
regimes, but from the bottom up. This approach yields a result that
sets Houston apart from zoned cities: its greater availability of
multifamily housing. Indeed, it would seem that the main
contribution of zoning is to limit housing production while adding
an element of permit chaos to the process. Land Use Without Zoning
reports in detail the effects of current exclusionary zoning
practices and outlines the benefits that would accrue to cities
that forgo municipally imposed zoning laws. Yet the book's program
isn't merely destructive: beyond a critique of zoning, Siegan sets
out a bold new vision for how land-use regulation might work in the
United States. Released nearly a half century after the book's
initial publication, this new edition recontextualizes Siegan's
work for our current housing affordability challenes. It includes a
new preface by law professor David Schleicher, which explains the
book's role as a foundational text in the law and economics of
urban land use and describes how it has informed more recent
scholarship. Additionally, it includes a new afterword by urban
planner Nolan Gray, which includes new data on Houston's evolution
and land use relative to its peer cities.
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