An interview with Nolan Gray on the history of zoning for exclusion and how a new approach to land use regulation could make our cities better.
By Jacob Pierce
Few situations look more complicated than California’s housing crisis. But sometimes, through a certain lens, the whole situation is actually quite simple.
Here’s an example: there’s a single 100-year-old-plus institution that may be simultaneously responsible for punishing renters, deepening segregation, hurting the environment, and strangling the United States’ economy so badly that it makes us all poorer in the process.
That would be the American institution known as zoning. It’s the practice by which local governments say what can be built where—and at what densities. Urbanist writer and researcher M. Nolan Gray lays out zoning’s troubling origins in his book Arbitrary Lines: How zoning broke the American city and how to fix it, which came out in June. Since its inception more than a century ago, zoning has only grown more complicated, more restrictive and also virtually ubiquitous. By limiting housing growth, the nation’s most prosperous and most environmentally friendly cities have sent rents soaring, while pushing Americans out into car-oriented swaths of suburban sprawl. In his book, Gray argues that cities would be better off eliminating zoning altogether.
Gray began working as the research director for California YIMBY this past summer. He lives in Los Angeles, where he’s a PhD student at UCLA, and he’s originally from Lexington, Kentucky. His parents met while going to college in the nearby town of Richmond.
Abundant Housing LA caught up with Gray to chat about his new book, what makes zoning so dangerous and how one city changed everything for him and his family.
You dedicated the book to your mom and dad, who you write ‘moved to the city made it all possible.’ Can you tell me about why you made that dedication?
Their story reflects the type of opportunity that I want to make sure that every American has, the ability to move from a poorer place to a richer place, the ability to move to a thriving, productive city and have access to affordable, decent housing and build a better life for yourself and your kids. It takes a lot of courage to do that. It’s very hard to move to opportunity, and I think we should celebrate that and remove a lot of these rules that stand in the way of people doing that and set up programs that help people do that. I’ve been very fortunate, and I want to make sure that everyone has that opportunity.
It sounds like you mostly enjoyed your time as a city planner for the city of New York, especially your time at the help desk. What did you like about the job?
It was a love/hate relationship, but one of the things I loved was working at the zoning help desk—helping people work through problems, helping people who, in many cases, didn’t have the capacity to lawyer up or hire a planner. To help them do the things that they wanted to do—build accessory dwelling units, start small businesses, build the types of small housing that New York City needed. The things that frustrated me with the job was the extent to which we had rules that stopped our city from growing and changing and adapting over time—many of the reasons New York City is so unaffordable. It has very out-of-date zoning.
You write a lot in the book about how pernicious zoning is. Those of us who’ve attended Abundant Housing LA’s Housing 101 workshop know about zoning’s racist and bigoted past. Your book shows, though, that its history is even more problematic than what many of us might have imagined. You write that zoning’s origins were—in New York, for instance—largely about keeping Jewish immigrants away from white neighborhoods and, in Berkeley, about warding off Black and Asian residents. And then, in the century since, zoning’s impact on segregation has been profound. In researching for this book, were you at all surprised by just how messed up this institution is?
I had known coming into this project that zoning had a checkered past with issues of racial or class-based segregation. But I didn’t realize fully, until drafting the book, just how core to zoning that was. Contemporary zoning spreads in the aftermath of a 1917 decision, in which the Supreme Court—in a rare moment of clarity on racial issues—said we’re not going to allow cities to do explicitly racist zoning, that white Americans can live here and Black Americans can live there. But in the aftermath of that, what you get is a lot of cities scrambling to develop policies that pursue segregation, but without explicitly mentioning race. So that is very core to what zoning is trying to do. It’s economic segregation. In the US, that gets you racial segregation.
Often, things that read as inoffensive to modern ears had an element of racial or ethnic or class-based animosity. So, for example in New York City, you hear about concerns from the Fifth Avenue Association about industry moving closer to the very posh shopping district. You hear that, and you think, ‘Well, it’s manufacturing; was it noisy? Was it smelly?’ Really, what they were concerned about was the poor Eastern European factory workers coming out on their break and scaring away their high-class clientele.
Or, in Berkeley, you read about ‘We have to keep industry out of neighborhoods, and you think, ‘Well, that makes sense. I wonder what kind of industries they’re worried about,’ and it’s Chinese laundries. So even in cases where it superficially seems like modern planning objectives are being pursued, zoning was being used to entrench some very unsavory segregationist attitudes.
Why do you think zoning needs to be abolished?
There’s pretty broad consensus now that the zoning system we have now is dysfunctional. It makes our cities unaffordable, unaccessible, segregated and sprawling. So there’s relatively wide consensus on zoning reform. The question is how we get there. And there’s a lot of exciting stuff happening there at the state level, especially here in California. In the near term, that makes a lot of sense to be the focus of our work.
But in the longer term, as long as local governments have total discretion—over getting to decide who gets to live where, what type of housing is allowed where, continuing to entrench car-oriented development—I worry that reforms won’t actually strike at the heart of zoning and solve some of these deeper underlying issues.
As long as people think of their home as an investment in the form of housing scarcity… or as long as people have unstated racial or class-based animosities… or as long as we have a system of land-use planning where elites get to decide what gets built everywhere and want to be able to drive and park everywhere… I don’t know if the reforms we’re pushing for will get us the goods. The project of the book is to say, ‘Let’s go back to basics.’ For the past 100 years, zoning has sucked all the air out of the room. We can still do land-use planning. I want to hit the reset button. What would it look like to have a planning framework that better solves our issues—and without all the baggage?
The lower-hanging fruit and nearer-term solutions are important, too. Such reforms could be helpful here in LA, where the need is high and so immediate. Got any words of inspiration?
Los Angeles is the most fixable city in America. Everything that is great about Los Angeles can’t be taken to other cities. You can’t take our perfect weather. You can’t take the beautiful mountains and the beaches. You can’t take the great culture. You can’t take the great food and music and entertainment industry. You can’t take that anywhere else. And everything that’s unpleasant about Los Angeles, we know how to fix. Housing is incredibly expensive. We know we need to build more housing. We know we need to legalize the construction of more housing. We need to build more housing of all typologies at all income levels. We know how to solve traffic congestion. We need to put prices on traffic at peak congestion times and invest that money in better transit and better bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
These are highly solvable problems, and, really, it just takes political will. It takes elected officials having the courage to act on these ideas that now have incredible pedigree and are actually quite popular—when you poll Angelenos about these issues—and act. So much of what’s standing in the way are rules that were adopted many decades ago that aren’t popular anymore. It’s OK to say, ‘Let’s rethink how LA should look and how LA should grow.’ Ironically, by trying to keep LA the same, our leaders have changed the soul of the city. They’ve made it a place where it’s very difficult to find an affordable apartment and pursue your dreams. But with a few small policy changes, LA would just be the best city in the world. No question.
Those interested in learning about the history of zoning laws in Los Angeles and how to reform them can register to attend Abundant Housing LA’s upcoming Housing 101 workshop, which will be held on Zoom at 12pm on Saturday, Oct. 8.
