Urban zoning is an issue on which the left and the right often find common ground: they don’t like it. The left often because they want the freedom to build multifamily and affordable housing in areas designated for single-family residences, and the right because of the undue red tape and restrictions on what can be built anywhere.

Often held up as a hero in this game is the city of Houston, Texas, famous for not having zoning. However, as Sara Bronin explains in her new book Key to the City, that’s not the full picture.

Outsiders picture a regulation-free developer’s paradise: “But in the unzoned city, private rules fill the regulatory vacuum left by zoning’s absence.”

While the city overall may lack zones, individual suburbs created their own rules:

The subdivision ordinance, for example, establishes building lines (front setbacks), parking requirements, and minimum lot sizes, all commonly found in zoning codes. The historic preservation ordinance, another example, requires some properties to undergo design review, a process sometimes required by zoning procedures. Technically, these ordinances are not zoning—a fact recently confirmed by the Texas Supreme Court. But they do deploy several zoning-like mechanisms.

The phrase “technically… not zoning” is, as the reader will have guessed, doing a lot of work.

The role played by zoning is just filled under the guise of other ordinances or specific covenants. This brings control down to a more local level, and it means that certain neighborhoods are able to restrict what is built in their area. (For example, she highlights affluent suburbs which are able to keep their single-family home character through covenants.)

But for the city as a whole, the lack of zoning means a lighter governmental touch, allowing Houston to grow much more rapidly than other cities and address the housing needs of its expanding population.

Bronin grew up in Houston, so she knew the situation well. As an adult, living in Hartford, Connecticut, she has also seen the effects of too much zoning:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hartford had ranked as one of the richest cities in the country. The insurance industry, innovative manufacturers like Elizabeth Colt and Albert Pope, and literary illuminati like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe had given the city economic and cultural prominence. Back then, Hartford was renowned both for its commercial and industrial bustle and for its stately elegance. “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief,” Twain enthused upon his first visit. “You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”

Nobody would say that about Hartford now. “Connecticut’s capital is now one of the poorest cities in the country—an island of concentrated poverty in one of America’s wealthiest regions,” writes Bronin.

Attempts at renewal in the mid-twentieth century ripped out gracious, historic homes and small apartment houses—while planning laws from the 1950s and 60s meant such houses could not be rebuilt, even if someone wanted to do so:

Zoning set onerous parking requirements that resulted in more asphalt, less building and green space, and too many paved-over lots like the one we were sweltering in that July day. Zoning rendered impossible the lovely townhomes and apartment buildings that had graced the avenue in its heyday.

It’s a common refrain among urbanists that the most desirable neighborhoods are often those it would be illegal to build today. “The paradox of zoning—the tragedy of zoning—is that it often starts out in a hopeful attempt to improve our cities and the lives we live in them. Then, all too often, it fails; it even does the opposite.”

The existence of zoning and restrictions also creates a culture of rent-seeking at best (and kickbacks at worst). There’s a fee to apply for a construction permit, fees for variances, fees to surveyors, fees to resubmit plans to the town council when they were rejected the first time…and an army of bureaucrats to manage the process.


Cover of Key to the City by Sara C. Bronin
Zoning, in some form, goes back a long way in the history of cities. In Colonial America, zoning started out with the kind of common-sense rules already in place in Europe. Don’t put smelly industries like tanneries in the middle of the town. Use brick for buildings near fire risks, like bakeries and forges.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, there were rules in the 1760s on minimum setbacks, appearance from the street, restrictions on livestock in the city, and rigorously planned streets. (Indeed these rules, and their results, helped with the recreation of the city as Colonial Williamsburg in the twentieth century.) Bronin picks up her narrative in the nineteenth century, when industrializing cities meant bigger changes needed to be made:

As Boston’s residential density increased, so did complaints about farm animals by residents living in closer quarters. Local leaders acted to mitigate their concerns. Boston was among many cities that passed laws prohibiting the keeping of swine, which had previously roamed streets eating waste. In 1830, the mayor banned cows from the Common, and in 1836 removed its pasture fencing. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city had instituted dispersion requirements for dairies, keeping them 300 yards from marshes and other farm animals.

As far as some of these rules go, most of us would have no problem. Much as we may want the freedom to build what we want, the human condition means we tend to want restraints on other people. I think zoning is a gross infliction of the state when it stops me from building a garage close to the road, but a very good thing if it stops my next-door neighbor from setting up an industrial hog farm. Thus I might choose to live in a subdivision with covenants, or a restrictive HOA, just because I can be confident that whatever blocks me from doing what I want will similarly block my neighbor.

But more restrictive urban zoning in America emerged out of the Progressive Era. Initially, civic planners wanted to remove slums and improve public health—and “city beautiful” types also focused on the aesthetics of the built environment. Yet as the automobile became more prevalent, this took over as a major factor: zoning focused on finding ways to allow cars to circulate and—crucially—to have somewhere to be parked.

The most toxic result of this has been minimum parking requirements for new construction. Anyone proposing an apartment block had to set aside a paved-over area for the potential residents’ cars. This not only created a pockmarked urban landscape, where infill development couldn’t be built (because there’s no room for parking), but largely priced out of the market the kind of small 4–6-unit buildings that featured in suburbs built before the 1940s—precisely the kind of buildings that once were affordable housing.

Meanwhile, city governments have tried to regulate and zone their way to more affordable housing without removing the regulations that made it so expensive to start with.

A recent housing regulation fad has been for “inclusionary” zoning: requirements for developers to include a certain percentage of “affordable” housing in new developments. Interestingly, Bronin comes down against such impositions, pointing out that:

…no research has shown that inclusionary programs actually create new housing. On the contrary, existing research suggests that inclusionary zoning actually increases overall prices, because developers recoup the costs of building their units by charging more for market-rate units. One study found that in California jurisdictions, supply was reduced by 7 percent and prices increased by 20 percent during a ten-year period in which inclusionary zoning was adopted. Opponents believe that for these reasons, inclusionary zoning constitutes a hidden tax on real estate development.

(Of course, anyone who has lived in California knows there’s nothing that Sacramento can’t make more expensive by imposing yet another law.)

A much greater boost to housing supply, “affordable” or otherwise, would be the removal of those pesky parking requirements. For instance, Bronin describes a “Density Bonus” program in San Diego that allows developers to build more units than zoning allows if they offer a proportion of them as affordable housing. This system produced modest results: just 145 units (15 affordable) in 2016. As she explains, lifting parking requirements had a much greater impact:

But in 2020, the year after parking mandates were lifted, the program produced 3,283 homes (over 1,500 affordable), many in the transit areas and many in 100 percent–affordable buildings made more financially viable when they did not have to provide parking.

Amazingly, when developers aren’t having to buy extra land for parking (or pay to tunnel under the building to create underground parking spaces), they can build housing more cheaply.

Bronin recognizes that zoning ruined Hartford, and only by allowing more flexibility in land use can we get back the kind of cities people want. But she still wants to zone our way in:

We must rewrite our codes to build more beautiful and more resilient places. Zoning can reposition nature as a vital form of infrastructure necessary to our health, well-being, and survival.

She’s still pro-zoning, but in a modified form.

Zoning is one of the more mundane -- and potentially nefarious -- aspects of modern living. Bureaucratic at its core, at times inscrutable for the average person, it can make or break a city. It can also ruin a neighborhood, encourage new business, or protect natural resources. Brown uses examples of zoning, good and bad, to illustrate her points, though I wish she had included more ways to create protective ordinances.

The passage about improving a street by reintroducing cars was surprising, while the author suggesting a roll back of First Amendment jurisprudence was alarming.

Key to the City is a discussion of zoning in the united states and how it affects daily life. The book uses a case study approach of telling the stories of different cities and towns in the U.S. and how choices about zoning have changed those cities, earlier on for the worse, but now for the better, mostly.

The book has a good approach to the problems created by zoning, specifically treating the topic as bigger than zoning. There is the more typical discussion of car infrastructure, but the book also looks at food, industry, nightlife, and building codes or land use more generally. The author is skilled at breaking down the minutia and explaining it for a general audience. The discussions are broad in scope throughout the United States, and address rural areas, even if Hartford, CT is the song's refrain of where the author was on the planning committee.

It is also NIMBY-lite. Acknowledging the problems that arose out of zoning policy arising from the Supreme Court decision in Euclid, including the bigoted portions of the decision itself, the author is interested in reform, not revolution. Some of it seems reasonable, making moderate improvements where the perfect is not the enemy of the good. Some of it seems wackadoodle, drawn from a technocratic satire: the 15 minute city They warned you about. This sometimes reaches the point where the book contradicts itself, where the spirit of the law trumping the letter leads to takes that I can square, but with effort.

There are a lot of personal asides that are vaguely objectionable. The afterward thanks the editor for making the book less wonkish, but I think that they ought to have zagged, using the author's adroit technical writing to educate rather than feeling the need to humanize. It is not offensive (contra another reviewer on Swift; my specific complaints are more blog grade), but it is unpersuasive. It does nothing for the author's thesis. At worst, it is repeating the old mistakes in a new way. But it is this quality that makes the book worth recommending.

Standard urbanist discourse falls into two camps, Libertarian and Progressive. The book comes from more of a centrist position with a small c-conservative streak: civil rights are good; now please go mow your lawn. This is a sort of identity that tends to get flack from both Right and Left (mostly Left). It is core, or adjacent to, opposition to urbanist policies. So, if the worst possible case is that this is old wine in new bottles, the best possible one is that this is a sort of manifesto for a non-traditional set of urbanists, expressing its own set of concerns. That is forward motion, and what productive political argument looks like. It is helpful.

Thus, this is one of those "if you read one book on the topic" books. It is not comprehensive, but if you are the sort of person who is otherwise disinterested in the concept of regulation creating policy, it may help you see what us wonks are wonking over.

My thanks to the author, Sara C. Bronin, for writing the book, and to the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, for making the ARC available to me.

This is a really excellent primer on urban planning and design, even for people who have no background in it. Bronin uses case studies to demonstrate how zoning laws can create a unique and pleasant urban landscape or a dangerous and unpleasant one. She also explains various urban planning concepts such as Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” and planning to accommodate pedestrians first and cars last. Highly recommend, especially for someone who wants to learn more about urban planning and doesn’t know where to start.

Taylor Swift != "Modern Day Elvis Presley"! I came into this book wanting to read about the American Government on the Fourth of July. Honestly, as an avowed Anarchist and former Libertarian Party official at both the State and local levels + 2x rural small town City Council candidate... I probably should have known better. ;)

It isn't that this book isn't illuminating nor well documented - it actually is reasonably good at both, with a bibliography clocking in at 21% of the overall text. Seriously, if you've never considered the topic of land zoning as it is practiced in the United States and how it is used to control you, your neighbors, your town, even to a slightly lesser (direct) manner your State and even the entire Country... you need to read this book.

Bronin truly does a great job of examining the history of zoning as practiced in the US, including how it came to be and why and how it has been used over the century or so since it first came into being. (Indeed, according to Bronin, the Supreme Court cases that effectively legalized the practice are still not quite a century old at either the writing of this review in early July 2024 or when the book is scheduled to be released in early October 2024.)

My issue, and I think it is objective enough (if, perhaps, barely) is that Bronin approaches this topic as a Chair of a Zoning Board who wants Zoning Boards to be even *more* active in limiting what you can do with the property that you legally own and actively encourages strategies to accomplish a very progressive agenda, including "Climate change" and mass transit theories that barely work in the extremely densely populated "Boshwash" (Boston - Washington DC) corridor she rules the aforementioned Zoning Board in - theories that could never work in the *far* less densely populated areas of South Georgia or even Central South Carolina that I've lived in, much less west of the Missisippi River where population densities (until you get to the Pacific Coast) largely truly plummet. And yes, there are *reasons* I mentioned my political background up front in this review. :)

As but an example, I point to the title of this review - at one point in this text, Ms. Bronin does in fact claim that Taylor Swift is a "modern day Elvis Presley". To be clear, if she had compared Ms. Swift to say the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or even Johnny Cash himself, that would have been a fair comparison and I would have had to find another example of where she is particularly outlandish without going into the actual details of the book (ie, spoilers). But as Ms. Swift never had to so much as register for the Draft - much less be selected by it and forced to serve in the US Military, this alone shows that Elvis was a different breed entirely. And to be clear, lest any Swifties attack this review just because of this paragraph, I'm not actually criticizing Ms. Swift. She is indeed a global phenomenon and is clearly quite talented in her own right. I am not saying otherwise or taking anything from her. I'm simply noting that for all she has done and all the fans she has, Elvis was *still* on another level from her.

Overall, read this book. Seriously. You're going to learn a lot, no matter your own political leanings or how you feel about the sanctity of private property. But "if you feel as I feel" (to quote the always amazing V for Vendetta), know there will be many points you will want to defenestrate this book forthwith and from the highest available window. But unless you've had the experience of myself or Ms. Bronin or the admittedly *numerous* people like us who *have* actively dealt with zoning boards at some direct level before... you really are going to learn some things here. Clearly, even *I* learned a few things here myself, even *with* a few years of directly relevant experience.

Recommended.