You know, I was driving through the suburbs the
other day, just one of those standard sprawling
subdivisions. And I had this moment of, I guess
you'd call it architectural deja vu. You look
at the setback of the lawns, the width of the
driveway, the fact that the nearest gallon of
milk is exactly an eight minute drive away. And
you realize none of this is accidental. Far from
it. No, it's arguably the most intentional design
project in human history. But we usually think
of cities as these organic beasts, right? Like
they just sort of happen. People built houses,
then a shop opened up, then a road. But looking
at this stack of research you sent over, the
articles, the legal history, the international
comparisons, it's clear that organic died a long
time ago. We are living inside a script. We are.
And the script writer is a concept that is. Simultaneously,
the most boring word in the English language
and the most powerful force in your daily life.
Zoning. Zoning. It sounds like the title of a
spreadsheet that won't load. But our mission
for this deep dive is to prove that zoning is
actually the invisible hand that shapes everything.
It decides who your neighbors are, how fat your
wallet is, how much carbon you emit. This is
the part that really surprised me. It might even
determine the GDP of the entire country. It's
the operating system of the built environment.
Yeah. And like any operating system, when it's
working, you don't notice it. Right. But when
it crashes or when the code is bad, you get dysfunction.
You get inequality. You get gridlock. So before
we get into the heavy stuff, the segregation,
the economics, the bagoom factories. We have
to talk about the bagoom factories. We do. But
first, we need to define our terms because I
think a lot of people, myself included, conflate
zoning with building codes. They seem like the
same bureaucratic red tape. They are cousins,
but they do very different jobs. I mean, think
of a building code as the engineering manual.
It tells you how to build. Okay. It says you
need this much rebar in the concrete or you need
a fire exit here or the wiring must be copper.
It is purely about safety and structural integrity.
If a building code fails, the roof falls on your
head. Right. So building codes prevent gravity
and fire from killing me. Pretty straightforward.
Exactly. Zoning, on the other hand, is about
land use. It doesn't care if your wiring is up
to code. It cares about what that building is
doing and where it sits in relation to everyone
else. So it's the social layer on top of the
engineering layer. That's a great way to put
it. Zoning asks, is this a house? Is it a factory?
Is it a park? How tall is it? How far back from
the street is it? So building codes stop the
house from burning down. Zoning stops me from
turning that house into a slaughterhouse. Precisely.
And that distinction is vital because zoning
is a social tool. It's about the collective arrangement
of the community. It's the rulebook that says
these activities happen here and those activities
happen there. And we have a lot of ground to
cover today. We're basing this deep dive on a
massive synthesis of sources, centering on the
comprehensive history and mechanics of zoning
from the Wikipedia archives, but pulling in economic
studies and legal case law. It's a huge topic.
It really is. We're going to look at the ancient
origins, the dark side American zoning history,
the toolkit planners use, and then... My favorite
part, how the rest of the world does it completely
differently. Oh, the international comparison
is where you really see how arbitrary our American
system is. It's. it's really eye -opening so
let's rewind way back i assume zoning was a 20th
century invention i pictured it arriving with
the model t4 and the skyscraper but the research
suggests this impulse to separate things is much
much older it's ancient as long as humans have
been clustering together in cities we've had
to deal with the bad neighbor problem if you
look at the walled cities of antiquity zoning
was dictated by the walls themselves. It was
binary, inside versus outside. Simple as that.
Basically, the logic wasn't about property values
or traffic flow. It was primal. It was about
noise and smell. The U factor. Right. Because
in 1000 BC, industry wasn't a guy with a laptop.
It was messy. It was visceral. Tanning leather
involves soaking hides. in, you know, urine and
lime. Brick firing creates massive amounts of
smoke. Slaughtering animals is bloody and attracts
pests. Not stuff you want next to the temple.
Not at all. So in the Zhu dynasty in China, or
the Vedic era in India, the rule was simple.
The clean stuff, temples, palaces, homes, goes
inside the walls. The dirty stuff, the tanneries,
the kilns, the graveyards, goes outside. It's
the original NMBism. Not in my walled city. You
could absolutely say that. Yeah. The Roman military
camps were another example. They were incredibly
standardized. You could drop a Roman soldier
into a camp in Britannia or Syria and he would
know exactly where the hospital was, where the
commander slept and where the horses were capped.
That is zoning in its purest form organization
for efficiency. OK, so for a few thousand years,
the logic is clean versus dirty. But then we
hit the Industrial Revolution and the definition
of dirty changes. It gets bigger. It gets industrial.
This is the pivotal moment. Before the Industrial
Revolution, a lot of production was cottage industry.
You might weave cloth in your living room. You
might make shoes in your kitchen. Home and work
were the same place. The original work from home.
Exactly. But when you move to steam power and
mass production, you can't have a Bessemer steel
converter in your kitchen. It's just not going
to fit. Right. Industry had to scale up, and
it became dangerous. You had massive factories
belching coal smoke, loud machinery. Toxic runoff.
And initially in places like London or Manchester,
these factories were jammed right next to the
tenements where people lived. And it was a public
health disaster. Cholera, respiratory disease,
squalor. I mean, it was just horrific. This forced
society to rethink the city. We realized we couldn't
just let cities grow organically anymore. We
needed to intervene. We needed to separate the
housing from the smokestacks. This leads us to
the Garden City. The notes mention Adelaide,
Australia. Which seems like a weird place for
urban planning history to start. It's actually
a critical milestone. In 1836, Colonel William
Light designed Adelaide. He didn't just lay out
a grid. He created a city center and completely
surrounded it with parklands. A green belt. A
literal physical buffer of green space. And he
said the suburbs go outside the green belt. He
legally defined where the city stopped and nature
began. This was revolutionary. And this catches
on. It inspires a guy named Ebenezer Howard in
the UK to start the garden city movement. He
saw Adelaide and thought, that's it. He envisioned
cities as these neat, concentric rings, public
buildings in the middle, then parks, then housing,
then agriculture on the outside. It sounds very
utopian, very orderly. It was. And it gave us
the visual template for the modern suburb. But
while the British were dreaming of garden cities,
the Americans were figuring out how to enforce
this separation legally. And this is where the
story gets complicated. Complicated and, frankly,
a little dark. We need to talk about the American
origin story of zoning. The standard textbook
narrative points to New York City in 1916, right?
The Equitable Building. That's the clean version
of the story. The sanitized version. The Equitable
Building was this massive skyscraper in lower
Manhattan that went straight up from the sidewalk.
A sheer cliff. No setbacks. None. It blocked
the sun for acres. People were terrified that
the city would become a dark... Windswept Canyon.
So New York passed the 1916 zoning resolution
to force buildings to step back. The wedding
cake architecture you see in old skyscrapers.
Right. Strictly about light and air. Very noble.
It sounds like a good thing. It was. But if you
dig deeper into legal history, the first true
zoning ordinance in the U .S. wasn't in New York.
It was in Modesto, California in 1885. And it
wasn't about skyscrapers. It was about laundries.
Specifically, wash houses. The ordinance made
it illegal to operate a laundry in certain areas
of the city. Now, on the surface, they argued
it was about fire safety laundries, used wooden
fires, chemicals, etc. It was a public nuisance
argument. But that wasn't the real reason. The
historical record is very clear on the intent
here. Who owned the laundries in 1885 California?
Chinese immigrants. Almost exclusively. The ordinance
was designed to prevent Chinese business owners
from expanding into white neighborhoods. It was
a tool of segregation disguised as a safety regulation.
That is a crucial distinction. We often assume
regulations are these neutral, benevolent rules.
But here, the very first tool in the zoning toolkit
was weaponized for exclusion. And the tension
between safety and exclusion. never really goes
away. It flows right into the big Supreme Court
case that legitimized zoning nationwide. Village
of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926.
Euclid? That's why we call it Euclidean zoning.
I always thought it was named after the geometry
guy because of the squares on the map. A common
mistake, but no, it's named after the town of
Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland. Here's the setup.
Ambler Realty owned a bunch of land. They wanted
to build industry factories, maybe some shops.
The highest and best use for their land, economically
speaking. Absolutely. The village of Euclid said,
no, we are zoning this for residential use only.
Single family homes, to be precise. And Ambler
sued, arguing that the city was effectively stealing
their money. Industrial land is worth way more
than residential land. By zoning it residential,
the city destroyed the land's value. Exactly.
They argued it was an unconstitutional taking
of property without just compensation. The Supreme
Court had to decide. Does a municipality have
the right to tell a private landowner you can't
do that simply to maintain the character of the
neighborhood? And the court said yes. It said
yes. Justice Sutherland wrote the opinion, and
he used a very specific and now very infamous
analogy. He called apartment buildings in single
-family neighborhoods parasites. Oof. Parasites.
That's not subtle. Not at all. He argued that
they block the sun, they bring noise, they interrupt
the peace. He literally wrote a nuisance, which
should be restrained. This cemented the idea
that single -family housing is the highest and
purest use of land, and everything else, apartments,
stores, factories, is a nuisance that needs to
be kept away. So Euclid gave every town in America
the green light to draw lines on a map and say,
houses here, stores there, factories way over
there. And that brings us to the dominant model
we live with today. Euclidean zoning. Let's break
down what Euclidean zoning actually feels like
on the ground. Because we're so used to it, I
don't think we realize how strange it is historically.
It creates a landscape of extreme separation.
In a Euclidean system, you have strict categories.
Residential, commercial, industrial, and usually
they are mutually exclusive. The color -coded
maps, yellow for houses, red for stores, purple
for factories. Exactly. And if you were in R1,
which is residential zone one, you can build
a house. You cannot build a corner store. You
cannot build a dentist's office. You cannot build
a duplex. Just a single family detached house.
This is why we have the donut city effect in
so many U .S. cities. The downtown business district
empties out at 5 p .m. and the suburbs are empty
at 11 a .m. It mandates a monoculture. It assumes
that a house and a loaf of bread are incompatible.
To buy the bread, you must leave the residential
zone, enter the transit corridor, the road, and
go to the commercial zone. It effectively mandates
the car. It makes the car a prerequisite for
participation in society. If you can't drive,
you are functionally excluded from large parts
of the city. But not everyone bought into this,
right? I mean, there had to be a backlash. And
this is where we have to talk about Jane Jacob.
The patron saint of the messy city. She hated
this separation. She loathed it. In her book,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
which came out in 1961, she argued that this
rational planning was actually killing the spirit
of the city. It was creating something that looked
nice on a map, but was terrible to live in. And
her famous concept was eyes on the street. Eyes
on the street. Unpack that for us. She observed
that in her neighborhood, Greenwich Village in
New York. It was safe and vibrant because it
was mixed. You had apartments above shops. You
had bars next to libraries. You had little workshops
next to homes. There were always people around.
Always. Because of that mix, the sidewalk was
always active. The shopkeepers watched the street
in the morning. The office workers watched it
at lunch. The residents watched it in the afternoon.
The bar patrons watched it at night. This natural
surveillance kept the peace better than any police
force. Contrast that with a Euclidean suburb.
If everyone leaves for work at 9am, the neighborhood
is a ghost town. No eyes on the street, it's
an invitation for crime, or just... Soul -crushing
boredom. Exactly. She argued that by separating
uses, we were creating dangerous, sterile environments.
Her work laid the foundation for what we now
call mixed -use zoning and new urbanism. Which
is the attempt to put the toothpaste back in
the tube, trying to recreate that small -town,
Main Street feel where you can live above the
bookstore. It's the antidote to Euclid. Mixed
-use zoning explicitly permits and even encourages
combining residential, commercial, and cultural
uses in the same building or block. But zoning
isn't just about use. The outline highlights
a shift towards form and performance. This seems
a bit more abstract. It's a philosophical shift.
Euclidean zoning asks, what happens inside the
building? Is it a home? A store? A factory? Right.
Form -based zoning asks, what does the building
look like? How does it relate to the street and
its neighbors? Wait, so form -based codes care
about the container, not the contents? Correct.
A form -based code might say, any building on
this street must be four stories tall, built
right up to the sidewalk, with 50 % of the ground
floor being glass windows. And if I want to put
a yoga studio in there, fine. A lawyer, fine.
An apartment, fine. As long as it fits the physical
rules? As long as the form respects the neighborhood
character. The goal is to create a pleasant,
walkable public realm, and they believe the use
will sort itself out. The classic example of
this, though it predates the term, is Paris.
Absolutely. Paris is incredibly uniform. That's
why it's so beautiful. That uniformity is law.
Paris has strict height limits and facade rules,
largely thanks to Haussmann's renovations in
the 19th century. They realized that if they
allowed modern skyscrapers to pop up randomly,
it would destroy the Parisian feel. But they
do have skyscrapers. I've seen pictures of that
one big black tower. The Montparnasse Tower.
Ah, the Tour Montparnasse. Built in 1973, it
is a monolithic 210 -meter black skyscraper right
in the middle of the low -rise city. It is almost
universally hated by Parisians. It sticks out
like a sore thumb. I've seen it. It really does.
It was such a visual and architectural disaster
for the skyline that two years later, the city
banned buildings over seven stories in the center.
They pushed all future high -rises out to a dedicated
business district, La Défense. It's often said
the best view in Paris is from the top of the
Montparnasse Tower. Because it's the only place
where you can't see the tower. That's brutal,
but it proves the point. Bad form can ruin a
city just as much as bad use. Then you have the
third type, performance zoning or impact zoning.
This is the most logical scientific approach.
It says we don't care what you build or even
what it looks like as long as it doesn't break
the environment or overload the infrastructure.
So instead of saying no factories, it says no
noise above 50 decibels or no water runoff greater
than X gallons per hour. Exactly. It uses a point
system. You manage your sewage. Points. You mitigate
traffic. Points. You provide affordable housing.
Points. If you get enough points. You get your
permit. That sounds incredibly sensible. Why
don't we do that everywhere? It seems so rational.
Because it's a bureaucratic nightmare. Who measures
the decibels? Who predicts the traffic? It requires
a massive amount of technical study for every
single project. It slows development to a crawl
because every building becomes a science experiment.
Ah, so it's logical but impractical at scale.
For most cities, yes. It's just too complex and
expensive to administer fairly. So we're stuck
with the simpler, blunter tools. Speaking of
tools, let's open up the zoning toolkit. Because
as I read through the source material, I realized
planners have come up with some very creative
and sometimes shady ways to bend the rules. The
mechanics of zoning. This is where the rubber
meets the road. Let's start with incentive zoning.
This feels like a negotiation. It is a transaction.
It's a deal. The city says to a developer, the
zoning map says you can only build 10 stories
here. But if you build a public plaza at the
bottom, or you include a daycare, Or you fix
the subway station entrance. We'll let you build
15 stories. They're selling the air. Critics
would say they are selling the integrity of the
plan. They are selling zoning rights. If the
infrastructure can't handle a 15 -story building,
why are you allowing it just because they built
a plaza? But supporters would say what? Supporters
say it's the only way to get private developers
to pay for public goods in an era of tight city
budgets. Then there's TDRs, transferable development
rights. This concept blew my mind. It's like
carbon credits, but for concrete. Yeah, it's
fascinating. In the U .S. property system, owning
land gives you a bundle of rights. One of those
is the right to build up to the zoning limit.
Let's say you own a historic theater. It's only
two stories call. But the zoning allows for 40
stories. So I have 38 stories of invisible skyscraper
that I'm not using. Exactly. Yeah. And you can't
use them because you can't tear down the historic
theater. With TDRs. The city lets you sever those
air rights from your land and sell them to the
guy across the street. Hold on, let me get this
straight. You can sell the air. You can sell
the development potential. Yeah. The guy across
the street, who is capped at 40 stories, buys
your 38 stories and builds a 78 -story megatower.
Yeah, I get paid. You get paid, which gives you
the money to maintain the historic theater. He
gets his tower, and the city keeps the same total
density. It's just shifted from your lot to his.
So it preserves landmarks? Or farmland. It's
often used to save open space. Farmers in a rural
sending zone sell their development rights to
developers in an urban receiving zone. The farm
stays a farm forever. It's clever. But then we
have the ugly tools, spot zoning. Spot zoning
is the black sheep. This is when a city council
takes one specific lot, maybe owned by a friend
or a major donor, and changes the zoning just
for that lot in a way that makes no sense with
the surroundings. This is a quiet residential
street, but this lot can be a 24 -hour gas station.
Exactly. It's zoning for a single parcel that's
inconsistent with the comprehensive plan. It's
frequently overturned in court because it's arbitrary
and looks like corruption. It violates the principle
that zoning should be applied uniformly. And
the most cynical one of all, fiscal zoning. This
explains so much about American suburbia. This
is the root of many evils. In the U .S., local
municipalities are funded largely by property
taxes, but they also have to pay for services.
Schools, police, roads. And schools are expensive.
Very expensive. So if you are a town planner,
you do the math. A shopping mall pays huge property
taxes and sends zero children to school. Pure
profit. A rateable. Right. A big office park
is another great rateable. A subdivision of starter
homes, on the other hand, brings in modest taxes
but sends hundreds of kids to school. That's
a financial loss for the town. So the town zones
everything for commercial or light industrial
and bans affordable housing just to balance the
budget. They try to attract uses that generate
taxes and repel uses that consume services. Exactly.
They zone for rateables. taxable assets, and
zone -out families. It's why you see huge office
parks sitting empty while people can't find a
place to live. The zoning map is being used as
a budget spread feed. We've also got pattern
zoning here in the toolkit, which seems a bit
more hopeful. It is. This is a strategy to combat
the housing shortage. Instead of a developer
spending a fortune on custom architectural drawings
that might get rejected, the city provides a
pattern book. A menu. Like ordering a combo meal.
a menu of pre -approved designs. Here are three
styles of duplexes, two styles of fourplexes.
If you choose one of these patterns, your permit
is expedited. You skip the line. That makes a
ton of sense for filling in the missing middle,
those small apartment buildings that fit into
neighborhoods but are usually illegal to build.
It reduces the risk for builders and lowers the
cost of housing. It's a return to how we used
to build, like the Sears catalog homes of the
early 1900s. Okay, so that's the U .S. toolkit.
And honestly, it feels a bit depressing. It feels
rigid and easily manipulated. But the most eye
-opening part of this research was looking abroad.
Because I assumed the whole world did it the
Euclidean way. Oh, absolutely not. The U .S.
is an outlier. If you want to see a completely
different philosophy, you have to look at Japan.
Tell me about Japan. Because Tokyo looks chaotic,
but it functions incredibly well. Japan uses
what we call inclusive zoning. In the U .S.,
our zoning is exclusive. If it's residential,
it's only residential. In Japan, they use maximum
nuisance limits. What does that mean in practice?
It means that in a lower zone, you can almost
always do the higher zone's activity. So in an
industrial zone in Japan, you can build a factory,
but you can also build a house. In a commercial
zone, you can build a department store, but you
can also build an apartment. Wait, so I can legally
build a house next to a factory? Yes. The Japanese
philosophy is, if you want to live next to a
factory, that's your choice. We won't stop you.
But the reverse is not true. You cannot build
a factory in a low -rise residential zone. It's
a one -way hierarchy of nuisance. That explains
the texture of Japanese cities. You turn a corner
and there's a quiet house next to a ramen shop
next to a small workshop. It creates incredible
density and convenience. It allows the city to
evolve organically. If a neighborhood needs more
shops, Houses can slowly convert to shops. In
the U .S., that would require a massive legal
battle to change the zoning map. In Japan, it
just happens. And they don't have the same minimum
pay power, right? The local homeowners can't
block everything. No. Zoning is controlled at
the national level in Japan. A local neighborhood
in Tokyo can't just vote to ban apartment buildings
because they don't like the look of them. The
national government sets the standard. If it
fits the box, you can build it. And they focus
on form, too. Yes. They rely on sunshine laws.
Heavily. Instead of worrying about use, they
worry about light. The building envelope is shaped
by angles to ensure that shadows don't perpetually
cover the neighbor's property. It results in
those interesting slanted roofs you see in anime
or Tokyo photos. Contrast that with the UK. I
was shocked to read that the UK doesn't have
zoning maps at all. Correct. The British system
is discretionary. They don't have by -right development.
By -right means if I follow the rules, I get
the permit automatically. Yes. In the US or Japan,
if the map says commercial and I draw a store
that meets the code, the city must give me the
permit. It's a right. In the UK, almost every
development requires planning permission. You
submit a proposal and the local council looks
at it and says yes or no. Based on what? Based
on a local plan and their own judgment. It's
extremely subjective. It's a vibe check from
the local council. A vibe check. Basically, it
allows for all the community input, but it creates
massive uncertainty. A builder never knows for
sure if they can build until the very end of
the process. That must make housing incredibly
expensive to build. The risk has to be priced
in. It does. The supply of housing in the UK
is strictly constrained by this process. And
it's a huge political issue over there. Now,
we have to talk about the anomaly. The city that
always gets thrown around in libertarian arguments,
Houston, Texas, the city with no zoning. A famous
exception. Is it true? Is Houston a lawless wasteland
where you can build a glee factory next to a
kindergarten? Well, yes and no. It is true that
Houston does not have a zoning ordinance. The
voters have rejected it multiple times. There's
no map that says commercial or residential. But
the city is not unplanned. Houston relies heavily
on private deed restrictions or covenants. When
a developer subdivides land, they write rules
into the property deeds. This land can only be
used for single family homes or no business that
sells alcohol. So the government doesn't ban
the factory, the private contract. Bans the factory.
It's private zoning. Exactly. And the city of
Houston enforces those private contracts. Plus,
they have parking requirements, lot size minimums
and setback rules that act very much like zoning.
So if you drive through Houston, it looks surprisingly
like Dallas or Phoenix. The mechanism is different.
Private law versus public law. But the outcome
is often similar sprawl. One last global stop
because I love the detail here. The Philippines.
The Philippines is interesting because of how
granular they get with industrial zones. They
don't just say factory. They rank them by hazard
and nuisance level. I have the list. Industrial
one is non -polluting. It says biscuit factories,
small watercraft. Harmless stuff. Things you
probably wouldn't mind living near. Industrial
two gets into polluting things. Canning plants,
textile mills. That's getting a bit smellier.
And then industrial three. High polluting and
hazardous. And the code specifically lists bagoon
factories. Bagoon is that fermented fish paste,
right? It's famously pungent. It's pungent. It's
delicious. But you do not want to smell it being
made 24 -7. I love that the zoning code explicitly
acknowledges the smell of fermenting fish as
a level three hazard. It shows how zoning adapts
to the specific culture and economy of a place.
Absolutely. It's a reminder that zoning is ultimately
about how people live together without driving
each other crazy. What's a nuisance in Manila
might not be a nuisance in Munich. Okay, so we've
seen the mechanics, the history, the global variations,
but... We need to land the plane on why this
matters to the listener right now, because we
opened by saying zoning determines your commute,
your wallet and your neighbors. Let's prove it.
The consequences. This is where the academic
literature gets really damning. Let's start with
the wallet, the economics. There was a study
in 2017, Shia Moretti, that made my jaw drop.
The GDT study. It's a famous one. They looked
at the U .S. economy and asked a simple question.
How much growth are we losing because people
can't move to where the jobs are? Right. The
most productive places in America, New York,
San Francisco, Boston are incredibly expensive.
And they are expensive largely because zoning
restricts the supply of housing. If you can't
build apartments, rent goes up. It's simple supply
and demand. If rent is high, a normal worker,
a teacher, a mechanic, a nurse can't afford to
move there for a better job. So they stay in
a lower productivity area. And this study found.
They estimated that if just three cities. New
York, San Francisco and San Jose relaxed their
zoning to be median level, not even Texas level,
just average for a U .S. city. U .S. GDP would
be 8 .9 percent higher. Almost 9 percent of GDP.
That's that's trillions of dollars. Trillions
of dollars of wealth that doesn't exist because
we won't let people build apartments. Other estimates
go up to 12 percent. It's a massive self -inflicted
wound on the economy. We are locking labor out
of the places where it could be most productive.
Then there's the social cost. Segregation. We
talked about Modesto and the laundries, but this
isn't just 19th century history. No. Modern zoning
is often called exclusionary zoning for a reason.
Yeah. There's a very strong statistically significant
correlation between strict density limits and
racial segregation. Jonathan Rothwell and Douglas
Massey did the big study on this. They did. They
found that in areas where zoning only allows
large lots and single family homes, you have
significantly higher racial segregation, even
after you control for other factors. The mechanism
is simple. Large lots are expensive. If you ban
small lots in apartments, you set a minimum price
of entry for the neighborhood. And because of
the history of the racial wealth gap in the U
.S., setting a high price of entry effectively
filters out minority populations. It's an economic
wall that functions just like a racial wall,
but it's legal under current law. And the homeowners
defend this wall fiercely. It's what economists
call the home voter hypothesis. Homeowners see
their house as their main financial asset. They
believe, often incorrectly, that apartments or
density will lower their property value. So they
show up to city council meetings and scream no
at any proposed change. And enbyism. Not in my
backyard. Enbyism. It's a cartel behavior. Existing
residents collude to restrict supply to boost
the value of their own asset at the expense of
everyone else, particularly the young and those
trying to move in for opportunity. And finally,
there's the human cost, the sheer rigidity of
it. The notes mention the Gloversville Free Methodist
Church in New York. This story is just awful.
This is a heartbreaking story from 2022. It was
freezing, minus four degrees Fahrenheit, dangerously
cold. The church wanted to open its doors to
let the homeless sleep inside, just to keep them
from freezing to death on the street. A basic
act of charity, of human decency. And the city
shut them down. Why? Because the church was in
a zone that didn't allow homeless shelters. The
zoning code didn't care that people might die.
It only cared that the use didn't match the map.
That's when you know the system is broken. When
bureaucracy overrides basic humanity, it's the
definition of a failed system. It illustrates
the fundamental problem. Zoning is a tool for
order. But it often lacks empathy. It lacks common
sense. It's a blunt instrument. So we're left
with this duality. Zoning saves us from the tannery
next door. It stops the skyscraper from blocking
our sun. But it also creates traffic, segregates
our cities and stifles the economy. It's a powerful
tool that has been used bluntly. The shift we
are seeing now toward mixed use, toward form
-based codes, toward allowing missing middle
housing is an admission that we overcorrected.
We tried to turn the city into a machine, and
we forgot it's supposed to be a habitat for humans.
We're trying to find our way back to the organic
city, but using a better rulebook this time.
Exactly. A smarter, more flexible rulebook. Here's
a final thought to leave you with. We started
by saying zoning was invented for the Industrial
Revolution to separate the dangerous factory
from the peaceful home. Right. But today, most
of us don't work in dangerous factories. We work
in the knowledge economy. My factory fits in
my backpack. It's a laptop. It makes no noise,
no smoke. Precisely. So if the nuisance is gone,
if work is clean and quiet, why are we still
separating it from our homes? Are we living in
cities designed for a 1920s reality that doesn't
exist anymore? I think we are. And I think the
cities that figure out how to reintegrate life
and work like we used to have before the car,
before Euclid, are going to be the winners of
the 21st century. They'll be more affordable,
more sustainable, and... Frankly, more interesting
places to live. Something to mull over the next
time you're stuck in traffic, driving past a
strip mall. And do yourself a favor. Look up
your local zoning map. Yes. Google your town
name plus zoning map. It's almost always online.
Find your house. See what color is. Read the
code. You might be shocked to find out what you
are and aren't allowed to do on your own land.
It's an eye -opener. A real one. Thanks for listening
to this deep dive. We'll catch you on the next
one. Goodbye.