More cities, suburbs need to wipe out zoning to get construction moving, author says

Minneapolis is one of the cities leading the country away from zoning rules that make it harder for people to own homes, says M. Nolan Gray, a California-based city planner who has become a national advocate for higher-density development.

With a new book, Gray argues that housing would be more affordable if developers were free to build multifamily dwellings in more places.

This year, he helped frame the national conversation on zoning in articles for the Atlantic magazine with provocative headlines such as "America Needs More Luxury Housing, Not Less" and "Cancel Zoning".

He was invited to the Twin Cities recently by Housing First Minnesota, the state's largest trade association for builders and suppliers, to discuss his book "Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It."

Gray gave an interview during the visit. Some excerpts:

Q: Was there a particular situation or experience that inspired you to write the book?

A: When I first started working on the book in 2020, I had the sense that there was enormous interest in zoning, and the role it played in the housing affordability crisis. But there was no one book I could point folks to explaining what zoning is, how it harms cities, and where land-use planning needs to go from here.

A: Very simply that zoning — this system where we let every local government come up with its own rules for segregating uses and restricting density — is at the root of so many issues facing cities, from housing affordability to economic opportunity to racial equity to sustainability. It will be quite hard to make progress on many of these issues without either substantially liberalizing or abolishing zoning.

Q: Is zoning the same as land-use planning?

A: Not at all, and it's an important distinction. Humans have been engaged in planning since we first started settling down — planning out streets and sewer lines, demarcating public spaces, regulating building materials and construction methods. Zoning is a young, experimental addition to that. It was largely adopted to do two things: first, to force cities into a sprawling form defined by detached single-family homes and cars and, second, to segregate cities on the basis of race and class. We could stop doing that tomorrow without touching anything traditionally thought of as planning.

Q: For cities, what's the most significant drawback to the current zoning system?

A: Zoning makes it illegal to incrementally grow and adapt over time. It's predicated on the idea that we can and should adopt a plan assigning the appropriate land use and density to every single lot in the city. Often, these ordinances rapidly fall out of date, forcing every project into a chaotic discretionary permitting process. But even when it's working as intended, zoning often bans anything that isn't a detached single-family home in most residential areas. That includes the small-scale multifamily and local-serving retail that enriched communities before zoning.

A. First, regulate the specific uses and impacts that truly bother people. There are some uses that we just know will bother people—adult-oriented businesses, heavy industry. Second, planners need to refocus their work around being stewards of the public realm. For example, planners should be coming up with efficient plans for the future growth of streets and sewers, managing on-street parking, charging new development the marginal cost of infrastructure.

Q. What's your view on "filtering," the idea that simply increasing the amount of housing no matter the price will increase affordability?

A. We know that, in places where the housing stock is allowed to consistently grow to meet demand, existing housing gradually gets more affordable. That's the traditional conception of filtering — that a home is built, and over the course of a decade or two, it gets cheaper, and it's true. But if you actually look at who moves into new market-rate units, you see a kind of filtering that happens immediately. If you follow the chain of moves triggered by a family moving into that new home, you see that it extends all the way down to the bottom of the market in many cases. That means that, when even a new luxury home is built, families all up and down the market are allowed to upgrade, relieving price pressure on housing at the bottom of the market.

Q. You write in the book and often talk about how Houston is the only major American city that doesn't have zoning. Any unintended consequences?