Reshaping the City

Zoning reform is having a moment. After the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, the word “abundance” has morphed from a descriptor of quantity into a prescription for deregulation, particularly when it comes to zoning, or the rules that govern the size, configuration, and use of buildings.¹ California governor (and possible future presidential candidate) Gavin Newsom signed a state override of local zoning laws to encourage development near transit, whether or not local leaders want it. Soon-to-be-former New York City mayor Eric Adams can boast that his administration passed the first comprehensive reform of the zoning code since the 1960s, and the likely next mayor, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, included “increasing zoned capacity” in his housing plan.

Zoning can be legalistic, technocratic, and, frankly, boring. At 3,091 pages, New York City’s code makes The Power Broker look like The Little Prince. But despite their abstruseness, rezonings often incite passionate disputes. I can recall more than one New York City zoning hearing where attendees of varying political identifications sabotaged the proceedings by chanting over professional planners, grabbing microphones from one another, or physically blocking officials from voting. Those who see zoning as central to their city’s fate take it extremely seriously.

In her book Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, the architect and land use lawyer Sara C. Bronin argues that zoning codes are crucial to understanding cities’ contemporary woes as well as rethinking their futures. She has written a number of scholarly texts on land use law, and this book, her first for a general audience, compiles her previous findings on some of the best and worst practices throughout the country. She wisely avoids many of the most studied areas, like New York City and San Francisco, and turns instead to places like Hartford, Connecticut, where she worked to rewrite the zoning code nine years ago, and Buffalo, New York. She grew up in Houston and describes her Latino family’s experience living, working, and commuting in that anomalously unzoned city. Now a prominent professor and attorney, she worked as chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation during the Biden administration and draws additional lessons from her neighborhood of Georgetown in Washington, D.C.

Surveying the landscape of American zoning, Bronin finds features to admire, but she is aghast at the overall picture. Excessively restrictive zoning blocks people from building the things that cities need, like multifamily housing or places to gather and socialize, while overly permissive zoning allows for socially and ecologically harmful construction, like factory farms built near homes and schools. Far too much urban space is dedicated to cars, whether they are parked or moving.² About three quarters of urban and suburban America is zoned for detached single-family homes, with only religious and educational uses permitted nearby, making it difficult to build low-cost housing and nearly impossible to get around without a car. In Connecticut, four fifths of residentially zoned land has a minimum lot size of one acre—seventeen times the size of a standard New York City lot.

Early in the book, Bronin offers her thesis:

When done right, zoning has the power to make all the difference for a community. Because zoning for good—for more vibrant economies, for greater household security, for more delightful experiences—is both achievable and necessary.

Later she defines “the ultimate goal of zoning: to encourage and enable the kind of development that facilitates enterprise and boosts a community’s quality of life.”

As a historical preservationist who welcomes new development, Bronin is an exception to the usual polarization in American land use discourse, which pits those who seek to limit or abolish zoning against those who seek to use it as a state-backed means to fight developers. People on the pro-zoning side typically call themselves “preservationists” or “neighborhood defenders” but are often attacked, fairly or unfairly, as “NIMBY” (Not in My Backyard). To this conservationist coalition, upzoning (changing zoning rules to allow for higher densities) enables builders to bulldoze all the things locals love about a place in order to maximize developers’ dividends. The other side, often characterized as “YIMBY” (Yes in My Backyard) by both its adherents and its detractors, favors upzoning to permit more housing development as well as other construction and sees historical preservation as a drain on urban dynamism and a cover for exclusionary impulses. Both poles attract people on the political left and right, and each considers the other an existential threat. By backing elements of both sides, Bronin seeks to chart a course for a centrist urbanism that embraces zoning’s importance while acknowledging the need for fundamental reforms.

Bronin’s most persuasive case for zoning is her discussion of Houston, the only large city in the US that refuses to enact a zoning code. As she points out, the lack of zoning does not mean that land use in Houston is unregulated; instead, it means that property owners get to conceive and enforce many of the most important rules through covenants written into deeds that delineate what future owners can and cannot do on their land. The most infamous private covenants were the rules that barred buyers from ever selling their property to certain types of people (Black people, Jews, or whatever the bigotry du jour dictated). Others are just privatized zoning rules. Bronin describes the ordeal her veterinarian uncle went through simply to set up a clinic on one floor of his home. One might imagine that Houston’s lack of zoning would make such a change easier. Instead he found himself stymied by a private covenant prohibiting commercial use, despite the fact that the home had a (perhaps unlawful) business in it when he bought it. To get a building permit, he had to sue the city to remove the covenant. In a city with zoning, such a combination might be explicitly allowed or encouraged, or at least restricted in a more transparent fashion. “But in the unzoned city,” Bronin writes, “private rules fill the regulatory vacuum left by zoning’s absence.” There is no citywide public process to determine what should and should not be allowed throughout the city, just a labyrinth of localized laws written and enforced by unelected private property owners.

Depending on how they are written, zoning codes can mean obsessive control over the built environment or utter indifference to considerations of construction and design. Bronin espouses some of both approaches in different situations. When it comes to housing construction, she urges planners to get out of developers’ way. But in her chapter on “complete streets”—roadways and sidewalks that challenge the primacy of the car by carving out space for pedestrians, bikers, buses, plants, and trees—she advocates for an architecturally prescriptive “form-based” approach to zoning that specifies where and how buildings should line up along a street and even determines many architectural features. For example, in Delray Beach, a small Florida city north of Miami, form-based zoning dictates that property owners must choose between seven styles for their buildings, including “Art Deco, classical, Mediterranean, and ‘Florida Vernacular.’”

Bronin argues that form-based codes produce both a cohesive sense of place and—though they may impose some additional costs on developers—higher property values. Because the book discusses homeowners far more often than it does renters, rising property values are treated as a social good that brings wealth to individuals and revenue to local governments. Rising property values often mean rising rents for tenants. Rent, however, is not a problem zoning alone can address. Architecturally prescriptive zoning will block a sprawling strip mall, but it will also block a large social housing complex if it does not adhere to the existing architectural norms. A form-based code might make a neighborhood nicer to live in, but only if you can afford to live there.

Because the book does not discuss rent control, public ownership, social housing, community land trusts, land value capture, or any programs to control fluctuating prices, a critical reader cannot help but wonder what will happen to the people who live in the places Bronin profiles after their cities and towns have been successfully rezoned and redesigned to be more enjoyable and valuable. Long-suffering residents of poorly zoned areas would surely like to stay and enjoy their newly redesigned cities, but will they be able to afford to do so when housing prices skyrocket as a result of their neighborhood’s newfound desirability? Bronin invokes the artist Theaster Gates’s desire to transform a nine-lane street in Chicago into a French-style green boulevard because the people of the South Side deserve it. And surely they do! But while rezoning might help transform the street, it cannot contain the economic forces such a beautification project would unleash. When New York City’s High Line was converted from a disused industrial railroad into a gorgeous elevated park, nearby property values doubled compared with the neighborhood median, sending rents and condo prices soaring.

Key to the City largely sidesteps politics, presumably to reach readers in Democratic and Republican districts alike. This can make the changes Bronin proposes seem so commonsense as to provoke no opposition. Opposition, however, is inevitable in rezoning, because no matter how technical, zoning is also about politics: political appointments, political power, political vision.

Throughout the book, there is surprisingly little discussion of political strategy or public processes. Reflecting on her own experiences in Hartford, Bronin recalls several times when committed community activists identified failures of planning—such as areas with few healthy food options or locations where cars frequently hit pedestrians—and provided ideas for solutions, which the planning commission then adopted. She does not, however, take readers through the process of turning those ideas into laws, in which those who want a change must overcome those who want stasis, and those with competing ideas for change (and for who will pay for it) fight to win favor. Public hearings are mostly described in the book as a time-consuming burden that should be lessened. This makes sense from the perspective of a public official who has to sit through countless hours of them but not from the perspective of a resident looking to have a say in the future of their city.

To anyone who has gone through a rezoning, Key to the City’s outlook may seem relentlessly positive. Bronin often identifies a major social problem but then suggests either that it is too big to resolve or that zoning can get us most of the way there. She recognizes the “classist views” behind a midcentury Nashville rezoning that transformed a low-cost residential neighborhood into an expansive arts, culture, and commercial district, for instance, but she celebrates the outcome nonetheless. After a heartfelt exposition of the harms of racial segregation and exclusionary zoning around the country, she offers a case for zoning policies that would bring higher-income white households into lower-income Black, Latino, and Asian neighborhoods. (She has also worked admirably to integrate white suburbs—an unavoidably political aim given white homeowners’ historically trenchant opposition to such actions—through the coalition Desegregate Connecticut, though she doesn’t discuss it in the book.)

In two places, however, Bronin embraces zoning’s political character and makes a welcome shift to a sharper tone. She describes large agricultural companies’ push to “maximize efficiency and drive down costs by every last penny”—by, for example, exploiting zoning codes to establish “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs) near residential areas—as a detriment to life on earth. In a section on street design, Bronin convincingly argues that part of the reason cities devote so much space to cars is that planners have ceded responsibility for streets to traffic engineers, who justify their car-centric designs by pointing to traffic manuals, written by unnamed engineers without any public debate or review, that emphasize vehicular flow over pedestrian safety or environmental considerations. The inevitable result is utterly preventable traffic deaths.

The ire Bronin summons on the issues of CAFOs and car culture makes for a stark contrast with the way she treats the other big issues she discusses, particularly housing affordability. In virtually every city and many smaller towns across the country, housing prices are far outpacing wages, leading to a groundswell of organizing to bring down rents and build up social housing. In their fight against big real estate, tenant organizers use much the same language as Bronin does in her critique of big agriculture, but if they read Key to the City they will find little of that fury aimed at corporate landlords or luxury developers. One reason Bronin may hold back on some of these other issues, however, is that zoning reform alone is rarely enough to resolve them.

In several places, Bronin acknowledges that rezoning an area will not in and of itself achieve the desired changes. She commends Minneapolis for comprehensively revising its zoning code to allow for more housing construction, for instance, but finds that not much was actually built. She makes a strong case for mixed-use density being essential to well-functioning public transportation, arguing that when housing, workplaces, retail, and community spaces are widely separated, transit systems cannot work and people spend an inordinate amount of time in their cars, but she laments that rezoning itself will not bring in new transit or demolish useless highways. That would require other planning decisions and, crucially, significant amounts of capital and operating funding, which many cities cannot afford, particularly in the absence of strong federal support for mass transit.

In one telling section, Bronin points to inclusionary zoning, or rules mandating that new development include some affordable housing, as an example of how “well-intentioned zoning policies can go awry.” Following up on a tip from her sister’s boyfriend, a Pittsburgh property developer, she finds that the city’s inclusionary zoning policy, implemented as a pilot program in 2019, failed to produce much affordable housing. She believes the problem is that in low-growth markets, inclusionary zoning ultimately imposes costs on developers that stymie housing production and raise prices overall. This may be true, but it overlooks another way the policy missed the mark. Bronin describes Pittsburgh as “one of the five poorest large cities in the country, with one-fifth of its residents living below the poverty line,” but she declines to mention that its inclusionary zoning rules require housing only for people earning two to three times the poverty wage. Bronin can demonstrate why the policy frustrates developers but not how it fails tenants, and thus she misses the opportunity to explain why zoning is insufficient to solve the problems of poverty and for-profit housing.

Given Bronin’s extensive work in Hartford, which she returns to several times throughout the book, I was curious to see how conditions there changed after its 2016 comprehensive rezoning, which allowed for more housing and business development throughout the city, altered rules about sidewalk and road design, and reduced public input over individual construction projects. Census data from the five years prior to and following 2016 show a confounding set of trends, which may or may not be related to the rezoning. On the positive side, the housing stock increased by 5 percent, including a notable number of new buildings with over fifty apartments. Labor force participation increased slightly, and real incomes went up by $2,653. But the same data also show a decline both in overall population and in population density, as well as a rise in vacant housing units that are neither for sale nor for rent. The number of detached single-family homes rose, while the number of denser attached homes fell. Most starkly, the racial income gap exploded, with white households’ incomes rising over thirty times more than those of Black households—a median increase of $13,594 versus $427.

As Bronin rightly reminds us, the effects of rezoning take time. Zoning codes are largely rules about what private developers can and cannot do, but these rules do not mandate that developers act. Still, it would be helpful to know whether Bronin believes Hartford’s rezoning is responsible for any of these changes, good or bad.

If zoning is the key to the city, we might wonder, what is the lock? For Bronin, zoning is ultimately both lock and key: the lock because it has been “cloaked in a shroud of mystery that obscured its culpability” and because it maintains features that residents might otherwise seek to change; the key because, armed with this knowledge, residents and city planners can rewrite zoning codes to radically reform cities. “Done wrong, zoning can yoke us to past mistakes, acting as an invisible drag on our aspirations,” Bronin writes. “But done right, zoning can be a revolutionary vehicle for transforming place.”

“Revolutionary” is a strong word. Elsewhere in the world, zoning is but one limited tool in the array of mechanisms available to urban planners. Bronin acknowledges this in the book’s final paragraph:

To be sure, zoning is not the only tool that matters. History, time, wealth, geography, and countless other factors will shape how communities evolve and develop. But while good zoning is not sufficient, it is necessary. Most important, it’s something that we control. And that makes it the key to building the cities and towns that we long for.

This disclaimer is itself necessary but insufficient. Zoning may be what American cities control, but that is largely because their power over so much else has been stripped away by federal and state policy and budget reforms. The high point of American planning was likely the New Deal, when government not only directed private capital but built new social infrastructure on a monumental scale. The historian Joel Schwartz has called the 1930s in New York City “a decade where everyone dabbled at planning.” Advocates for a Green New Deal seek to revive this era of decisive state action and implicitly critique the notion that zoning is the pinnacle of planning.

American planning is so tethered to zoning in large part because it is the last option available. Sure, it might be better for cities to build mass social housing, but with the resources they have, an upzoning will do. Yes, it might be best to build high-speed rail lines and streetcars across the nation, but reducing parking mandates is a start. Certainly we would like to rebuild large urban commons for community farming, but for now we can at least relax rules against keeping chickens and bees.

To move beyond these limited horizons, we need politics: political movements of organized people fighting for their interests and contesting those who exploit them. Rezoning should be a component of those politics, but it cannot be their sum. Even if it were, any major rezoning effort is sure to encounter resistance. Reshaping the city takes power, not just policy.