City planner: Local zoning codes effect “less affordable, more inequitable” housing market

Professional city planner Nolan Gray purports that zoning codes — laws through which gov’t planners dictate what can/must be built where, and to what extent — have led only to sprawling, unequal, and exorbitantly pricey living areas. Gray advocates for abolishing zoning codes in favor of privately managed regulations like deed restrictions. This interview originally appeared in City Journal’s 10 Blocks podcast.

(3:09⁠–⁠3:24) In the book [Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It], I argue that [zoning] has been done in a pretty unsystematic way, and it’s worked to make cities less affordable, more inequitable, more unequal, and more sprawling. And I think we can do better.

(5:48⁠–⁠6:32) … [T]hese codes have become exponentially more strict in the 100 years or so since they were adopted, particularly over the last 50 years.

So, for example, in the New York City context, of course, the city would go out to rewrite its zoning code in 1961. It would become much more complex. By that point, we had things like floor area ratios, which put really strict limits on the amount of floor area you could build on any given lot. By that point, the city had adopted things like minimum parking requirements, which forced developers to build maybe giant parking garages or large surface lots that they wouldn’t otherwise have built.

And over time, it’s become a system that’s become very complicated, very unruly, fairly unpredictable, and it’s made cities like New York City very difficult to build in, of course — which has had knock-on effects for housing affordability.

Listen to the whole thing here. https://www.city-journal.org/10-blocks

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