Episode 22: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
A book 'review'
As a conservative seeking higher office in California, one will sooner or later (almost certainly ‘sooner’) be asked “How will you deal with the housing crisis???”
In a post to come soon, I’ll lay out some specific proposals that will increase the supply of housing both at market rate and at rates accessible to lower-income folks. Today, we’ll focus on what the author of Arbitrary Lines identifies as a contributing cause to the housing crisis: zoning.
First, a quick definition, since not everyone knows what zoning even is. Borrowing from the author:
“At a basic level, zoning is how government regulates land uses and densities on private land in most US cities and suburbs.”
For example, if you own a piece of land and want to build a small grocery store on it, if your land is zoned “residential”, you won’t be allowed to build your store, even though you own the land. You’d have to go to your local government and petition for a “variance”, which basically just means “permission to violate the zoning rules” in some very specific, government-approved way.
Our author has 194 pages of thoughts about zoning, so before I dig into points of agreement and disagreement, let’s do the grades:
Readability: A
Ideas: B+
Conciseness: A-
Overall grade: A-
Our author’s central point has a premise and a conclusion. The premise is that zoning creates artificial scarcity in housing supply by preventing construction that would otherwise happen in the absence of zoning. The conclusion is that zoning should be utterly abolished, absolutely everywhere, regardless of the wishes of the people in any given affected area. I’m going to mostly agree with his premise, while mostly disagreeing with his conclusion.
Here are some points of agreement, all related to the author’s premise:
Zoning artificially reduces the supply of housing in an area by forbidding any residential development on some fraction of a city’s land, and even more, by allowing only single-family residences on yet another fraction of a city’s land.
One of the primary motivations of zoning historically has been to keep “undesirable” people out. In practice, that all too often meant keeping minorities out of white neighborhoods. As someone who grew up in St. Louis, one of America’s most segregated cities, I can tell you this is absolutely true. Zoning was one tool in a toolbox that included other strategies like redlining and restricted covenants, all of which functioned primarily to keep Black people confined to a few parts of St. Louis.
Zoning inevitably creates a hugely complicated set of rules and regulations, a set that only gets more complicated over time, thereby exhibiting exactly the kind of government creep that any real conservative should feel a physically repulsed by.
Because any new project has to navigate this government creep, any project owner is likely forced to rely on contacts within government to help push the project through the process, which means in the best case scenario projects increasingly become feasible only for the well-connected, and in the worst case scenario opportunities for corruption abound, as people try to grease the wheels to get their projects approved any way they can.
In absence of zoning, market forces will actually accomplish the vast majority of what zoning purports to accomplish, all without the need for all the extra rules, regulations, and inevitable government creep that zoning creates.
Despite all that agreement on the premise, I and the author diverge on his conclusion, which is to eliminate all zoning everywhere, full stop. Our disagreement is rooted in the classic question: “Do the ends justify the means?”
In this context, the question is: “If we’ve decided that we need more housing, and there’s a community where people live in single family houses, and we’d really like to build a bunch of large apartment buildings there, then are we justified in shoving that housing down the throats of that community whether they like it or not? After all, it’s only because we’re pursuing a noble goal!”
Here in California, the Democratic party increasingly says “Yes. Build the housing whether the folks who already live in that community want it or not.”
I don’t agree with that.
As a conservative, my biggest points of disagreement with conventional liberalism often come down to: other people *also* have rights. For example, yes, we should try to help homeless people. But the communities homeless people are in *also* have rights- for instance, the right to walk down public streets without having to dodge tent encampments. Yes, we should not be overly reliant on incarceration in our criminal justice system. But communities also have rights; for instance, the right to feel confident that any changes to criminal justice policies will make their communities safer, not less safe. And yes, we should build more housing, but the communities that housing gets built in also have rights- the right to be the style of community they want to be.
Now, that’s not an absolute right; constructive conservatism seeks “a reasonable balance.” Thus, if someone wants to buy the house next door to you and they have the money to do it, you don’t get to veto that just because you don’t like the color of their skin, or what gender they identify as, or what god they worship. Those aren’t reasonable ways to “preserve your neighborhood’s character”. However, rejecting a massive apartment building from your neighborhood of otherwise single family homes *is* actually reasonable. I fully concede it’s not optimal from a top-down social policy perspective, but a top-down social policy perspective is not the only perspective that matters- communities have rights too.
And that’s the heart of my disagreement with our author: he thinks your hand-wavey, namby-pamby desire to preserve your neighborhood’s character is not ever reasonable. He’s grudgingly willing, in certain narrow circumstances, to tolerate it. But increasingly here in California, you won’t even get that much from the Democratic party. These days, what you hear from the Democratic party in Sacramento is: “we’ve decided we need more housing, and we’ve decided we want to put some in your neighborhood, so we’re just going to do that, whether you like it or not. I mean, what are you going to do about it? Vote for Republicans?? Hahaha, narf!”
And that’s the way it will be, until enough people say “Well, actually, yes- I’m going to vote for a Republican if they’re committed to bringing reasonable balance to policy around here.” Which, fun fact, is what I’m committed to doing!
So how do we get more housing built in a reasonable way? I promise, that post is coming soon…