Book Review: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

An unfortunate reality of policies implemented with the express purpose of racial and class exclusion is that even when the intentions change but the policies remain on the books, they still have the same exclusionary outcome. Such is the case with zoning in America, born out of a desire to protect a certain race and class in America to the exclusion of others, like African Americans, Chinese, Jews, and so on. M. Nolan Gray, research director at California YIMBY and who worked in New York City zoning at one point, in his 2022 book, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix it, demonstrates how these exclusionary policies hold back America, particularly its communities of colors and lower class.

As a former reporter, I sat in on many zoning meetings — by far the most attended government meetings of any kind, in my experience — where angry community members overwhelming told council members, township officials, and zoning boards “not in my backyard.” NIMBYs have many stated reasons for opposing a new apartment complex or more housing, such as a concern about traffic flow and patterns, the added pressure on city/township/village services, and a concern about a decrease in their property values, but all of that is the varnish over what the real reason is: they don’t want poor communities of color and the supposed “riffraff” they bring moving into their neighborhood, thanks to more housing. Some won’t say that, of course, and others were far my open about that in my reporting. Yes, even ostensible liberals and progressives.

NIMBYs, Gray argues, through zoning, lock in a system that is built for (heh) and maintains single-family housing and does so through an arbitrary system, making us all poorer and worse off. Zoning is a fundamentally wrong policy, he argues, and he’s not in favor of tinkering around the edges with reform. Gray wants to abolish zoning and this arbitrary, exclusionary system.

I learned a lot in Gray’s book, and one of those items was how the federal government incentivized local zoning nearly more than 100 years ago by essentially dangling road, housing, and disaster recovery money in front of local governments and tying it to an adoption of a local zoning plan. As I mentioned, elite homeowners and landlords favored zoning to prevent the people particular uses would attract, such as one example Gray uses from NYC, where a business pushed back against manufacturing because it attracted immigrant Jews, which they called “flies.”

So, what is zoning? It can get confusing, especially when it’s lumped into planning, like I’ve often noticed at the local level. Zoning isn’t what people tend to think of, like noise and pollution issues. Rather, what zoning boils down to is land use and density in cities and suburbs. Zoning builds nothing (those interested in building something build something), but rather can only prevent something from being built, or the way in which it is desired to be built, as it were. Often with the latter, this means the builder paying back into city/township/village coffers to comply with arbitrary and onerous rules. I’m also glad Gray confirmed what I noticed in my own reporting: permitting and allowances therein are discretionary based on what the city/township/village official(s) want to do and allow. And not to belabor the point, but we know what the other word for discretionary is: arbitrary.

Another item I learned from Gray was the home voter hypothesis, wherein because of the system we’ve created with homeownership being seen as an investment, it’s no wonder we’ve created a nation of NIMBYs looking to protect their investment versus having an expansive attitude. Of course, others would argue this creates a great incentive for homeowners to ensure their communities and government are good (to protect that asset), but Gray argues it is exactly this incentive model that prevents anything from being built in the country, and the counterintuitive misallocation of labor issue. Americans are moving away from highly productive cities, like San Jose, to places like Phoenix. In other words, Americans used to migrate within the country to wealthier places, where they could earn more, but because of zoning (and a few other issues), that’s creating a different incentive.

This city flow problem is why Gray argues that zoning isn’t the local issue people think of it as. If the federal government incentivized the system we have now, that not only makes it necessarily a federally-created issue, but it demands that the federal government ameliorate the issue. And to bring it back full circle, unlike schooling and roads, where policy was crafted to be exclusionary of communities of colors and the lower class, but later reversed by the federal government, “apartheid through zoning,” Gray argues, still remains an area of racial and economic exclusion. That’s why even though schools aren’t segregated by law anymore, schooling remains deeply segregated in practice because of the spillover effects of zoning.

Gray also addresses environmental concerns. That’s the other aspect of community concerns I noticed as a journalist: worries about greenspace and the impact on the environment. Gray makes a counterintuitive case that increased densities actually reduces the carbon footprint, and of course, creating a flow of people to places like Phoenix doesn’t help environmental concerns either. The way the former is achieved is because cities can build up instead of out, which means we don’t need to encroach upon “meadows, forests, deserts, and wetlands.” Urbanites also tend to live in smaller townhouses and apartments, thus reducing electricity consumption. One of the more shocking facts Gray introduced to bolster his environmental argument is that a resident of Vermont, a state you would think of as a bastion of environmental stewardship, consumes three and a half times as much gasoline per year as the typical resident of New York. Go, cities!

Gray is not against planning; he’s against zoning. He’s all about “embracing the grid.” Zoning merely gets in the way of good planning. Planning is where you can address issues of public services and resources. If we want to end what Gray calls the “social project” of zoning as a tool for racial and economic segregation, then the way forward is to abolish zoning. Just because it’s been around for more than 100 years doesn’t make it a good thing; as mentioned, it was born out of a time from people with worse intentions than the zoning-proponents of today have, but with the same deleterious and exclusionary outcomes.

For as wonky as Gray’s topic is, and to be sure, I still was too in the weeds at times, this as accessible a book on zoning and planning as you’re going to find. He outlines the issue and potential solutions in a way any American, including hopefully the typical NIMBY, can understand.