Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

     In Arbitrary Lines, M. Nolan Gray makes the case against zoning. His thesis is that zoning is not just a good institution gone bad. Rather, he says that its purpose is to exclude, to increase property values/prices, to slow the pace of new development, and to segregate cities by race and class through the elevation of the detached single-family house as the peak of human development. I think that while he is certainly right about those all being effects of zoning as well as motivations for its creation, I don't think he gives enough credence to zoning as a means of creating predictability for builders and as a mechanism for avoiding inefficient lawsuits. I can't help but think that both he and I have experiences that make us think that the systems we have seen up close are inefficient. Gray was a planner, and wants the local bureaucracy out of land use, but as a law student, I can say that the legal system is also highly inefficient and so I don't really want it with us.

    The case of Houston continues to confuse me. Gray points out that Houston doesn't have zoning and gets along fine using deed restrictions in about a quarter of the city and then other restrictions on things like noise pollution. Houston forms some natural patters typical of cities, such as high development at the center and industrial uses around major arteries. But I wish Gray would have gotten into car use in Houston. He mentions it offhand and I know its not central to his book, but it just feels weird to discuss Houston without addressing why it is one of the most car-mandatory cities in the country. If a city that isn't zoned ends up like that, we need an explanation why. I don't feel like Houston is that great of a city, but I've never been. But if New York is achieving better urban development with zoning, then I don't think zoning is the problem.

Miscellaneous Fact:

• By misallocating huge amounts of the US labor market through zoning, economists Chant-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti have found that zoning causes an annual loss of $1.6 trillion in wages. They also found that zoning reduced growth by 36 percent between 1964 and 2009..