Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I want to start
today with a bit of a Matrix moment. Okay, I'm
intrigued. You know that scene, right, where
Neo finally stops seeing the walls and the furniture,
and he just starts seeing the green code cascading
down? Oh yeah, the code that's making up the
reality around him? Exactly. He stops seeing
the illusion and starts seeing the software.
I know exactly the one. Right. So I want to try
to do that today, but for the physical world.
I want you. and everyone listening to just take
a look around for a second. It's a good exercise.
Seriously. If you're at home, look out the window.
If you're walking your dog, just look at the
street. If you're driving, maybe keep your eyes
on the road, but look at the strip mall you just
passed. What do you see? And more importantly,
why do you see it? Well, normally you see a house
or a factory or a skyscraper. And you think,
okay, that skyscraper's there because a developer
bought the land and decided to build a tall building.
Simple enough. Or that factory is way over on
the edge of town because, you know, land was
probably cheap out there. We tend to think the
layout of our world is, I don't know, organic.
We think it's the result of the free market or
just the natural way cities grow over time. It
just sort of happened. Exactly. But as we went
through the research for this deep dive, I realized
the American city is about as organic as a microchip.
It is engineered. It is coded. And that code
is what we're talking about today. We are talking
about zoning. And I can hear the collective groan
of the audience right now. Oh, absolutely. Zoning.
It sounds like the absolute tedious peak of local
bureaucracy. It really does. It brings to mind
late night city council meetings, bad coffee,
stacks of paper. And people arguing about the
height of offense. It sounds incredibly boring.
It sounds like the driest topic we could possibly
pick. Yeah. But here's the headline I want to
start with and the reason we were doing this.
Okay. This boring bureaucracy is arguably the
most powerful social engineering tool in American
history. That is not an exaggeration at all.
It is the operating system of the built environment.
It determines who your neighbors are. It determines
if you can walk to a grocery store or if you
have to get in a car and drive. It determines
how much your house is worth. Or if you can even
afford a house in the first place. And as we're
going to see, it has determined quite strictly
how segregated our society remains to this day.
It's the invisible architecture. And to understand
it, we have to understand that this system, I
mean, it didn't just appear out of the ether.
It was invented. It was invented. It was invented
for very specific reasons that have, frankly,
nothing to do with fence heights. So our mission
today. is to unpack this beast. We're going to
look at how a system that was originally designed
just to stop nuisances, like, you know, simply
keeping a slaughterhouse away from a kindergarten.
Which everyone agrees is a good idea. Right.
How did that simple idea somehow mutate into
this massive tool for wealth creation and exclusion?
It's a fascinating and kind of scary evolution.
But before we get into the history, which involves
everything from laundromats to mountain lions,
weirdly enough. It gets weird. We probably need
to agree on terms. When you and I say zoning,
what are we actually defining? Yeah, let's get
the definitions out of the way so we can get
to the drama. Yeah. Because for me, zoning just
feels like a map with colors on it, you know,
red, yellow, blue. That's the visual representation
for sure. But strictly speaking, zoning is a
system of laws that divides a jurisdiction's
land into districts or zones. Yeah. And within
those zones, the law limits two main things,
use and form. Use and form. Okay, let's break
those down. Use seems straightforward enough.
Use is the what. What activity is allowed to
happen on this square of dirt? Can you build
a house? Can you build a smelting plant? Can
you open a Starbucks? So you can't build a house
in a factory zone. Right. In a strict zoning
regime, these are mutually exclusive. You cannot
put the Starbucks in the smelting plant zone,
and you certainly can't put the smelting plant
in the residential zone. Got it. And form, what's
that? Form is the how. It dictates what the building
physically looks like. How tall can it be? How
far back from the street does it have to be?
That's the setback. How much of the lot can be
covered in concrete versus, say, grass? This
is often called the bulk regulation. So use is
no factories here, and form is your porch can
only be 10 feet from the sidewalk. Precisely.
And the scope of this is just... While it regulates
everything, it's not just big categories. It
gets more specific. Oh, incredibly granular.
Some zoning codes will specify whether you can
sell furniture in a specific spot or how many
square feet of paved space you can have in your
driveway. Now, here's the part that I got stuck
on when I was reading. I own my house. I pay
the mortgage. I pay the taxes. If I want to build
a shed in the backyard to sell homemade pickles,
or if I want to build a roller coaster for my
kids, why does the government have the right
to stop me? Isn't that a violation of my property
rights? And you have just hit on the central
tension of the last hundred years. It feels like
it should be my land, my rules. You would think
that owning land means you control it. But legally,
zoning relies on a concept called police power.
Police power. That sounds intense. It sounds
like it involved handcuffs and SWAT teams. It
does sound that way, doesn't it? But in constitutional
law, it's much, much broader. Police power doesn't
just mean law enforcement officers. It refers
to the inherent capacity of the states to regulate
behavior and enforce order within their territory.
And what's the justification for that? The betterment
of the health, safety, morals, and general welfare
of their inhabitants. Ah. General welfare, that's
the magic phrase. That is the catch -all. The
argument is, your right to build a pickle shed
or a roller coaster ends where your neighbor's
right to a rat -free, quiet, safe existence begins.
So my rights end at my property line. Basically.
And the state delegates this police power to
your local town council. So when the planning
board tells you no, they are essentially flexing
the same constitutional muscle as a cop arresting
a bank robber. They are maintaining order. That
puts a very different spin on the local planning
board meeting. They aren't just bureaucrats.
They're exercising state power. Exactly. And
to understand how they got that power, we have
to wind the clock back. Because this didn't start
with some grand plan to make cities beautiful.
No. Looking at the history, it seems incredibly
reactive. It wasn't some founding father who
loved urban planning. Not at all. It started
in the Wild West, essentially. California, late
19th century. This is where we see the first
real attempts at land use control. And it brings
us to the wash house ordinances. Wash houses.
OK, so for the modern listener, a wash house
implies the laundromat with, you know, coin operated
machines. Yeah. But in 1880s California, this
was an industrial operation. It absolutely was.
You have to imagine large vats of boiling water,
steam, chemicals, open fires to heat the iron.
All in wooden buildings probably? Often in wooden
buildings. They were significant fire hazards
and they were noisy. They were industrial. So
looking at Modesto, California in 1885, they
pass an ordinance banning wash houses from certain
areas of the city. On paper, you can see why
a city might want to do that. If I'm living in
a wooden house in Modesto in 1885, Maybe I don't
want a fire -prone industrial laundry next door.
That sounds like a legitimate safety concern.
That was the legal argument. Health and safety.
It always is. But we have to look at the context.
Who owned the laundries in California at that
time? It was predominantly, if not almost exclusively,
Chinese residents. Exactly. This was the era
of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Anti -Chinese sentiment
was the dominant political force in California.
So this wasn't really about fire safety. Well,
the law was about fire safety. But the motivation
was something else entirely. Modesto passes this
ordinance. Then Los Angeles follows suit between
1904 and 1909. They created specific districts
where laundries were illegal. And the boundaries
of those districts just happened to align with
where the white residents lived. You got it.
It was a master class in using a neutral law
to achieve a discriminatory outcome. Right. The
law didn't say no Chinese people allowed. No,
it said no laundries allowed. But since the laundries
were the economic engine of the Chinese community,
the result was exclusion. This seems to be the
recurring theme of our research today. The tool
is technical. It's about fire safety or noise.
But the motive is social. That's the pattern.
And it wasn't just laundries. Los Angeles started
using these early laws to separate other nuisances.
We're talking about slaughterhouses, tanneries.
Things that smell bad. Things that smell really
bad. And crucially for L .A. oil drilling. I
always forget that L .A. was basically one giant
oil field back then. Massive. It was there will
be blood meets the beach. You had oil derricks
popping up in people's front yards. They were
loud. They smelled like sulfur. And they occasionally,
you know, exploded. OK, so. I'm going to play
devil's advocate here again. If I bought a nice
bundalow, I definitely do not want an oil derrick
or a slaughterhouse next to my porch. Of course
not. That seems like a very rational thing for
the government to prevent. It is rational. And
that is why zoning survived the courts initially,
because at its core, separating a slaughterhouse
from a kindergarten is a good idea. No one argues
with that. The problem is that once you establish
the legal power. To separate uses based on nuisance,
you can start defining nuisance in very subjective
ways. Right. A slaughterhouse is a nuisance.
Is an apartment building a nuisance? Is a corner
store a nuisance? Is a family with a different
skin color a nuisance? That's where the slippery
slope begins. So while California was dealing
with wash houses and oil wells focusing on use,
New York City was dealing with a totally different
problem. A very different problem. They were
dealing with form. And specifically, they were
dealing with the sun. The sun. Or rather the
lack of it. This takes us to 1915, right? Yes.
The catalyst here is a specific building. The
Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. It's still
there today. You can go see it. And the problem
wasn't that it was too tall necessarily. It was
that it was fat. It was massive. It went straight
up from the property line. It covered the entire
lot. It didn't taper at all. So it was just a
giant block. A giant stone block that blocked
the windows of neighboring buildings and cast
a shadow that extended for blocks. It literally
stole the sunshine from the... streets below.
And people were terrified. They looked at this
thing and thought, if every building in Manhattan
is built like this, New York will become a dark,
dank maze. No light, no air, just canyons of
stone. It was a very real, very visceral fear.
So in 1916, New York City passed the first citywide
zoning resolution. This is really the grandfather
of modern zoning in America. But they didn't
ban skyscrapers. I mean, that would have been
impossible in New York. No, that would have killed
the real estate market dead. Instead, they mandated
setbacks. Explain setbacks for us, because this
fundamentally changed how our cities look. Imagine
a wedding cake. OK. The base is wide. Then as
you go up, the next layer is a bit smaller. back
from the edge then the next layer is smaller
again the 1916 law said that once a building
reached a certain height a height based on the
width of the street it was on it had to step
back so the higher you go the skinnier the building
has to get exactly this allowed light and air
to actually reach the sidewalk it stopped the
streets from becoming dark tunnels and this literally
shaped the skyline of new york city for decades
if you look at the empire state building or the
chrysler building they have that stepped tapering
shape. That classic art deco look. That's not
just an artistic choice. That's the law. It was
the law. And it was popularized by this illustrator,
Hugh Ferris. He drew these moody, futuristic,
almost gothic renderings of what the city would
look like under these new laws. He made zoning
look almost romantic. Wow. He turned a bureaucratic
rule about angles into a whole architectural
style. So we have California banning uses to
separate people and industries. We have New York
regulating form to save the sunlight. But how
did this go from just a few big cities to the
standard operation? procedure for the entire
United States. For that, we have to look at the
federal government and specifically a man named
Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover. Before he was
president, he was the secretary of commerce.
And Hoover was an engineer by trade. He was a
huge believer in standardization, efficiency
and order. He wanted to increase home ownership
in America. And he saw zoning as a tool for that.
He saw it as a way to protect property values,
which he believed would encourage people to buy
homes and feel secure in their investment. So
he didn't want every city in America reinventing
the wheel. trying to write their own zoning laws
from scratch. Right. His team at the Commerce
Department drafted something called the Standard
State Zoning Enabling Act, or SZEA. It was published
in 1922 and revised in 1924. It was basically
a template. It was a copy and paste job. The
federal government basically said to the states,
hey, you want to do zoning? Here is a pre -written
law that lets your town set it up just past this.
And they did. They absolutely did. It swept the
country. This is why zoning laws in a small town
in Ohio often look legally very similar to zoning
laws in a suburb of Seattle. They're all working
off the same hundred -year -old template. The
same template provided by Herbert Hoover. Okay,
so the system is in place. But Americans, we
don't like being told what to do with our property.
If I buy a plot of land and I want to maximize
my profit, surely I'm going to fight back against
these rules. Oh, the fight was immediate. And
this brings us to the single most important legal
case in the history of zoning. The big one. Village
of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. from 1926.
This is the Euclidean and Euclidean zoning. I
admit, when I first heard that term, I thought
it was about geometry. Like Euclid the mathematician.
A lot of people do. It's a common mistake. But
no, it refers to the village of Euclid, a suburb
of Cleveland. And this case is the reason zoning
as we know it exists today. So set the scene
for us. What happened in Euclid? Ambler Realty
Company owned a large tract of land, about 68
acres. It was prime real estate. It sat right
between a railroad and a main road. Perfect for
industry. Perfect. In a free market, this land
was destined for factories, warehouses. That's
where the money was. But the village of Euclid
had other ideas. The village passed a comprehensive
zoning ordinance, and they zoned a huge chunk
of Ambler's land for residential use only. So
Ambler Realty is sitting there doing the math.
If I sell this for factories, it's worth, say,
$10 ,000 an acre. If I had to sell it for houses,
it's worth maybe $2 ,500 an acre. That's right.
The government, with the stroke of a pen, just
wiped out 75 % of their land's value. So they
sued. They sued. And their argument was powerful.
They said this was a taking of property without
due process, a violation of the 14th Amendment.
They said, you didn't physically take my land,
but you took its value. You took my right to
use it. And initially the lower court agreed
with them. They did. The trial court judge actually
called zoning an illegitimate device. He saw
right through it. He said it would lead to economic
segregation and that you can't just strip value
from people to make the town look nice. But then
it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And
the Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, reversed
the lower court. They sided with the village
of Euclid. Why? How did they justify that massive
loss of value for the property owner? They went
right back to that nuisance argument. Justice
Sutherland wrote the opinion. He famously said,
That is the famous quote. A pig in the parlor.
And by separating uses, keeping the pigs, which
were factories, out of the parlor, which were
the residential neighborhoods, the government
is protecting the health and safety of the community.
And that protection is more important than the
developer's profit. They ruled that it outweighed
the financial loss of the developer. And boom,
Euclidean zoning becomes the law of the land.
Separation of uses. Houses here, shops there,
factories way over there. the government officially
has the right to decide. But there's another
really important case we have to mention, which
actually happened before Euclid, that sets up
the racial dynamic perfectly. Okay. Buchanan
v. Worley in 1917. This one is fascinating because...
On the surface, it seems like a win for civil
rights. But when you dig into the reasoning,
it's purely capitalistic. It is. So in 1910,
the city of Baltimore tried to pass a zoning
law that was explicitly racial. It designated
blocks as either black or white. Wow. They weren't
even hiding it. No laundries excused. This block
is for black people. This block is for white
people. No subtlety at all. And other cities
followed. Atlanta, Louisville, St. Louis. But
in 1917, the Supreme Court struck this down in
Buchanan v. Worley. So they said, you can't segregate
by race. That sounds good. It does sound good.
But, and this is the absolute key, they didn't
strike it down because they believed in racial
equality or integration. They struck it down
because it violated the right to contract. So
it wasn't it's wrong to discriminate. It was
it's wrong to tell a white property owner they
can't sell to a black buyer if they want to.
Exactly. It was a property rights ruling, not
a civil rights ruling. They said the government
cannot interfere with the sale and alienation
of property based on the color of the buyer's
skin. So explicit racial zoning is dead in 1917.
But we know cities didn't just give up and integrate.
Not even close. They just got smarter. They found
the loophole. What was the loophole? Since they
couldn't zone by race, they started zoning by
type of housing. They created single family residential
zones. Which effectively did the same thing.
Right. If you ban apartments, you are in effect
banning the people who live in apartments and
historically who lived in apartments. Lower income
workers. Yeah. Immigrants. Minorities. Exactly.
So you get segregation by class, which functions
as a very effective proxy for segregation by
race, all while appearing race neutral on paper.
The law just says single family detached homes
on one acre lots. It doesn't mention race. We
aren't banning black families. We are just banning
buildings that aren't single -family mansions.
It was devious. And incredibly effective. It
basically created the American suburbs as we
note them today. Now, whenever I talk about zoning,
someone always brings up the outlier. The one
city that zigs while everyone else sags. Yeah,
yes. Houston, Texas. The no zoning city. I hear
this all the time from my libertarian friends.
Look at Houston. They have no zoning and it works
fine. Or from critics who say Houston has no
zoning and it's a chaotic, ugly mess. Right.
So what's the reality? Well, let's burst the
myth a little bit. Houston doesn't have traditional
use zoning. It's true. Voters there rejected
it three separate times in 1948, 1962 and 1993.
They are very proud of that fact. But I sense
a but coming. But if you drive around Houston,
does it look like a chaotic jumble of factories
next to nurseries? No. No, it doesn't. It looks
like every other Sunbelt city. It looks like
Atlanta. It looks like Phoenix. It's sprawling
and car dependent. So why is that? If there's
no zoning, why isn't there a steel mill next
to the elementary school? Two big reasons. First,
they have deed restrictions. These are private
rules, not government rules. Yes, private covenants.
When a developer builds a subdivision in Houston,
they write strict rules into the deeds of the
houses. Like what? You can only use this for
a single -family home. You can't run a business
here. You must cut your grass every week. And
the city enforces these private rules. The city
attorney's office handles the enforcement. So
instead of the government saying this is a residential
zone, the private developer says this is a residential
neighborhood and the city backs them up. So the
outcome is identical. The outcome is functionally
identical. And the second reason. What's that?
Development regulations. Houston still has rules
about setbacks. And crucially, they have strict,
and I mean strict, parking requirements. Ah,
the parking requirements. The hidden killer.
They are the hidden killer of density. If you
legally force every business to have a massive
parking lot, say, 10 spots for every 1 ,000 square
feet of retail space. You physically cannot build
a walkable neighborhood. You can't. It's impossible.
If 60 % of your city's land has to be asphalt.
for cars. You force everything to be spread out.
So the no zoning city is actually just a privatized
zoning city with really aggressive parking mandates.
Precisely. It's a distinction without a difference,
really. It's a failed control group in the great
American experiment. OK, let's talk about the
bill. The cost. Because this isn't just about
aesthetics or history. This hits our wallets
every single month. We're in a housing affordability
crisis in this country. A severe one. The rent
is too damn high. How much of that is zoning's
fault? A significant amount. I mean, it comes
down to basic supply and demand. And zoning,
by its very nature, artificially limits supply.
Give me an example of how that works mechanically.
Okay, let's talk about minimum lot sizes. This
is a very common zoning tool. A town might say,
you can only build a house here if the lot is
at least one acre. One acre. That's huge. In
a dense city, you could fit 10, 15 townhouses
on an acre. You could fit an apartment building
with 50 units. Right. So instead of 50 homes
for 50 families, the law says you can only have
one home for one wealthy family. drastically
legally reduce the supply of housing on that
piece of land. And when supply is low and demand
is high. Prices skyrocket. Economists have a
concept for this. They call it the zoning tax.
This isn't a check you write to the government,
right? No, it's not a literal tax. It's the difference
between the actual cost of construction, the
materials, the labor, the raw land and the final
price of the house. It's the artificial inflation
of the value due to regulatory scarcity. It's
the premium you pay just for the permission to
exist. That's a great way to put it. I saw some
numbers on this in our notes and they were staggering.
In San Francisco, that zoning tax is estimated
at over $400 ,000 per home. Let that sink in.
$400 ,000 of the price tag isn't the bricks,
the wood, or the labor. It's not the profit the
developer made. It is just air. It's the cost
of permission to exist in a restricted market.
And it's not just San Francisco. No. In Seattle,
New York City and L .A., it's around $200 ,000.
Chicago and D .C., around $80 ,000. That effectively
prices out an entire generation of people. I
mean, $200 ,000 is the down payment. It's the
whole mortgage in other parts of the country.
It does. And it hurts the economy as a whole.
There was a fascinating study in 2017 that suggested
if just three metro areas, New York, San Francisco
and San Jose, deregulated their zoning to the
level of the median U .S. city, U .S. GDP could
wise by almost 9%. 9%. Other studies have put
it as high as 12%. That's trillions of dollars.
How? Because right now, zoning prevents labor
mobility. It prevents people from moving to where
the most productive jobs are. If a talented software
engineer can't afford to live in Silicon Valley,
they don't move there. They take a lower productivity
job somewhere else. We are leaving massive economic
growth on the table because we refuse to build
apartments. And speaking of Silicon Valley, let's
talk about Los Altos Hills. The ultimate example.
Los Altos Hills is a town in Silicon Valley.
The entire town, and I mean essentially the whole
thing, is zoned residential with a one acre minimum
lot size. And only one primary dwelling is allowed
on each of those one acre lots. Correct. The
courts upheld this back in the 1970s. So effectively,
this town has legally banned anyone who cannot
afford an acre of land in one of the most expensive
real estate markets on planet Earth. It is a
velvet rope around the entire city. It's a gated
community disguised as a municipality. It is.
And this leads us directly into the social engineering
aspect, because when you ask these towns why
they do this, usually they give you some excuse
about traffic or school overcrowding. But sometimes.
Sometimes they tell you the quiet part out loud.
Yeah, I saw this quote from Barrington Hills,
Illinois. It's incredible. This was a few years
back. They have a five -acre minimum lot size.
That's acres. Five acres. And officials there
actually told the Chicago Tribune that this helped
keep out the riffraff. Keep out the riffraff.
I mean, at least they're honest. It's stark.
But it's not just about lot size. It gets even
more personal. It's about the very definition
of family. This brings us to a Supreme Court
case I'd never even heard of. Village of Belterre
v. Boras. This is a crucial one, especially for
college towns. The village of Belterre, New York,
had a zoning ordinance that defined a family
very strictly. It said a family is people related
by blood, adoption, or marriage. So a traditional
nuclear family, essentially. Right. And then
it restricted the number of unrelated people
who could live together in one house to just
two. Two. So a group of six college students
renting a large house to save money. Illegal.
Six elderly women, like the Golden Girls, trying
to live together for companionship and to save
money. Also illegal. Did the Supreme Court really
uphold that? They did. In 1974, they said the
government has a legitimate interest in protecting
traditional family values and keeping neighborhoods
quiet. They said boarding houses and fraternity
houses bring noise and traffic. But it effectively
targets the poor and the young. If I can't afford
a house on my own, my only option is to have
roommates and this town is telling me that having
roommates is a crime. It creates a huge barrier
to entry. And this is where the politics get
very, very messy. We tend to think of regulation
as a liberal thing and deregulation as a conservative
thing. But in zoning, those lines are completely
blurred. Right. The data I saw shows that support
for banning apartments, multifamily housing is
concentrated among affluent homeowners. And there
is no substantial difference between liberal
and conservative homeowners on this issue. When
it comes to their own backyard, ideology goes
right out the window. Everyone becomes a NIMBY.
Not in my backyard. So a liberal homeowner might
have a Black Lives Matter sign on the lawn. But
then they'll go to a city council meeting and
fight tooth and nail against a new duplex that
would allow black families to actually live in
that neighborhood. It's the classic, I love humanity,
I just don't want them parking in front of my
driveway. That's it, exactly. And we have to
talk about the environmental cost, too. The irony
here is just so thick. Right. Zoning was originally
about health, fresh air, separation from industrial
smoke. But by enforcing low density, by making
everything spread out so far, zoning forces car
culture. You have to drive everywhere. You have
to. You can't walk to the grocery store if the
zoning code says the grocery store has to be
three miles away across a six -lane highway.
So we are all driving more, longer commutes,
more emissions. Exactly. We are pushing development
out to the fringes, to the exurbs, where carbon
emissions per capita are much higher. And we
are creating sedentary lifestyles because walking
isn't a viable form of transportation for most
Americans. So the tool designed to protect public
health is now contributing to obesity and climate
change. A tragic irony. Now, sometimes this NMB
-ism, this desire to stop development, gets weird.
I mean, really weird. You want to talk about
the mountain lions? I want to talk about the
mountain lions. The Woodside incident. This is
a classic. It just happened in 2022. Okay, so
Woodside, California. Very wealthy town in Silicon
Valley. The state of California passed a law,
SB 9, saying towns had to allow more housing.
Woodside didn't want to do it. So what was their
brilliant plan? Their plan was to declare the
entire town a mountain lion habitat. The whole
town. The manicured lawns, the swimming pools,
the tennis courts. All of it. The whole town.
Their argument was that because mountain lions
might potentially walk through, they couldn't
possibly build any duplexes. They were trying
to use an environmental loophole to get out of
building affordable housing. That is bold. Did
it work? No, not for a second. The California
Attorney General, Rob Bonta, shut it down immediately.
He basically sent them a letter saying, a developed
suburb is not a protected habitat. Stop acting
in bad faith. Acting good faith. That seems to
be the struggle here. Towns are using every trick
in the book. They are. And it's not just animals.
It's signs. Lawn signs are actually a huge zoning
battleground. Really? First Amendment issues.
Huge First Amendment issues. Zoning regulates
signage to prevent what they call visual clutter.
But the courts have consistently ruled you can't
regulate the content of the sign. So you can
say no signs bigger than three feet by three
feet, but you can't say no political sign. Exactly.
Or no for. For sale signs. This was a big issue
in the 70s. Some towns tried to ban for sale
signs. Why would they do that? They claimed they
wanted to prevent panic selling or blockbusting
when minority families started moving into a
neighborhood. But the courts struck that down.
They said, you can't ban communication just because
you don't like the message it might send. And
then there's religion? R -L -U -I -P -A, the
Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons
Act. This is a federal law that protects religious
institutions from discrimination in zoning. Because
churches are often in residential areas and neighbors
often complain about the traffic or the noise.
Or more controversially, about the social services
they provide. There was this heartbreaking case
in Gloversville, New York. A free Methodist church
wanted to open a shelter. For the homeless? For
the homeless. They wanted to provide 40 beds.
It was negative four degrees outside. And zoning
stopped them. The zoning board said a shelter
wasn't a permitted use in that zone. They effectively
blocked the church from saving lives in freezing
weather because it violated the code. That is
where the rubber meets the road. We're arguing
about codes and maps and neighborhood character,
and people are literally freezing to death on
the street. It highlights the central tension
between protecting the stability of a neighborhood
and meeting basic human needs. The system, as
designed, prioritizes the former. And here's
the hopeful part of the deep dive. Maybe things
are changing. We are seeing a shift in the 21st
century that I don't think anyone predicted 20
years ago. The pendulum is definitely swinging
back. For 100 years, local towns had total control.
The state said, here, you take the power. Now
states are realizing the towns have, in many
cases, abused that power. So they're taking it
back. Let's talk about the pioneers. Minneapolis,
what did they do? Minneapolis, 2018. They became
the first major U .S. city to end exclusionary
single -family zoning. Just ended it. Well, they
didn't ban single -family homes. They just said,
you can only build single -family homes. They
legalized triplexes, essentially citywide. They
also completely abolished off -street parking
minimums. That is radical. That is undoing 100
years of Euclidean thinking. It was a massive
deal. And then Oregon followed. A state law,
House Bill 2001 in 2019. What did that do? It
said, if you are a city with more than 10 ,000
people, you have to allow duplexes everywhere.
If you have more than 25 ,000 people, you have
to allow triplexes and fourplexes. So the state
of Oregon looked at the local towns and said,
you aren't building enough housing, so we are
overriding your local rules. That's exactly it.
You lost your privileges. California did the
same with SB 9 in 2021, allowing up to four units
on what used to be single family lots. And over
on the East Coast, my home state, Massachusetts.
The MBTA community's law. This is fascinating
policy. It requires towns near public transit,
near the T or the commuter rail two zone for
multifamily housing as of right. The logic being
we, the taxpayers of the whole state, built this
expensive train station. You, the local wealthy
town, shouldn't be allowed to block people from
living near it. It makes perfect sense. But it's
a huge fight. The town of Milton voted not to
comply in early 2024. They just defied the state
law. law. So what happens now? Now the attorney
general is suing them. This is the active battlefront
of American domestic policy right now. It's happening
in real time. And the politics are so fascinating
because it's bipartisan. You have this weird,
strange bedfellows coalition. The YMBY coalition.
Yes. In my backyard. You have Republican governors
like Charlie Baker and Mitt Romney in Massachusetts
or governors in red states like Montana pushing
for this. Why? Because they believe in market
freedom. They believe in property rights. If
I own the land, let me build on it. Deregulation
is a conservative value. And at the same time,
you have progressive Democrats pushing for it.
For completely different reasons. They're focused
on affordability, social equity and climate change.
Density reduces carbon footprints and allows
for more economic and racial integration. So
the libertarians and the democratic socialists
are high -fiving each other over duplexes. It's
one of the few places in American politics where
the horseshoe theory is actually working. So
let's wrap this up. We've covered wash houses,
wedding cakes, the Supreme Court, and mountain
lions. What is the big takeaway here? I think
if we look at the big picture, zoning started
as a reasonable attempt to fix the chaos of the
Industrial Revolution. It was about health, light,
and safety. It was about stopping factories from
poisoning neighborhoods. A pig in the parlor.
Right. It was about keeping the pig out of the
parlor, but it mutated. It did. It mutated. It
became a mechanism for wealth protection that
accidentally, or in many cases, purposefully
broke the housing market and segregated the country.
It prioritized the property values of the haves
over the basic needs of the have nots. And now,
for the first time in a century, we're actively
trying to undo that Euclidean knot. We're trying
to blend uses back together. We're trying to
return to the way we built cities for thousands
of years before 1960. Organic, mixed, walkable.
A place where the grocery store is next to the
barbershop and the barbershop has an apartment
on top of it. I want to leave our listeners with
a final thought. You mentioned this to me before
we started recording and it really stuck with
me. It's a question of values, really. I want
you to imagine your own neighborhood right where
you live. And imagine the zoning laws changed
tomorrow to allow a small grocery store on the
corner or a duplex next door to you. Would you
see that as the destruction of your investment?
Would you be angry about the potential for more
traffic and, you know, noise? Or would you see
it as the creation of a real community, a place
where you could walk to get a gallon of milk,
a place where your kid's teacher could afford
to live? Because ultimately, a city isn't just
a collection of property values. It's a collection
of people. Something to think about next time
you look out that window. Thanks for listening
to The Deep Dive. See you next time.