Simon Webber: The case for abolishing zoning

The City of Brotherly Love is admired so much for its charming streets and largely cohesive urban fabric. Around every corner in the city could be some quaint street or architectural marvel. The city of Philadelphia is notable for its uniformity in street layout and lot sizes, as well as its unique neighborhoods, from Manayunk to Queen Village. 

What makes these neighborhoods so charming and unique, compared to the average American community? These neighborhoods were developed organically, and continue to be flexible as they evolve, where a new business can easily adapt to a retail space where ten different businesses came before. A homeowner can add an extra floor to his house where he sees fit. Take a look at the average suburban American neighborhood full of identical houses without a store in sight: if someone from the distant future were to uncover both these older neighborhoods and newer “communities,” he might suppose they are from entirely different civilizations. What, then, separates the nature of virtually all neighborhoods before the 20th century to those after?

To understand the nature of the modern American city, you must first understand what came before it. When William Penn sailed up the Delaware and founded Philadelphia, he took after enlightenment ideals to plan a “green country town”, as he aimed to create something greater than the dense and dirty cities of Europe. As the city grew and expanded, all that remained of Penn’s plan was the city’s uniform grid and parks. 

The bucolic town gradually grew more urban and dense. Penn had a vision, but the agency of men trumped the government’s will. The city has since grown into a beautiful urban fabric, with distinct neighborhoods and charming streets.

As the invisible hand guides the form of the city, the urban density is proportional to the demand to live and work in these neighborhoods. This creates a relatively affordable and natural structure to the city, where residents’ amenities are met by the market. As the right to private property was held sacrosanct in colonial America and for most of independent America, an equilibrium in the urban form created cohesive cities, where every man had jurisdiction to build whatever he may on his property. In a city without zoning dictating the minimum lot size, maximum lot coverage, building height, number of parking spaces, and much more, market forces created a city where such a walkable, mixed-use environment was taken for granted.

To truly understand what these traditional neighborhoods have to offer, we must first look at the modern American neighborhood. 

A neighborhood of unaffordable cookie-cutter homes, with cul-de-sacs leaving a horrendously disconnected built environment. A neighborhood where a walk to the grocery store may take an hour, walking endlessly through winding streets to be dumped onto busy arterial roads lined with parking lots and ugly strip malls. A neighborhood where the HOA dictates the color of every house, the time that trash cans can be put on the street, the length of your lawn grass, and so much more. If you wanted to expand your house into a duplex, the city zoning code would never allow such a thing. This neighborhood is stuck in time, as it was built. Every regulation possible stultifies the neighborhood from evolving with demographic or economic changes.

The style of development prevalent across the US after World War II has led to a litany of issues in American municipalities, from financial ruin to horribly inadequate infrastructure. So many cities and suburbs across the country are struggling financially, as the low-density “suburban experiment” has stretched municipal utilities and infrastructure thin. Zoning regulations that restrict density of development, whether explicitly, or through building form restrictions, fail to pay for municipal expenses, as with more people using one power line, road, etc., expenses decrease per capita, and tax increases are always political suicide. 

The dense downtowns, or otherwise pre-WWII areas of cities, end up subsidizing these contemporary neighborhoods, as they generate a tax surplus for municipalities. The heavy restrictions on development through zoning lead to a limited supply of housing, driving up housing prices. Since these mixed-use, walkable environments tend to be so rare across the country, they often run for a premium compared to modern suburban-style developments. The often euclidean nature of zoning, where land uses are separated, leads to further unwalkable environments as already spread-out residential neighborhoods don’t contain the amenities people need on a daily basis. Clearly the enemy isn’t the big bad developer coming to build an apartment building in your neighborhood, it is the government limiting the supply and nature of our housing stock.

I do not advocate for the removal of every regulation on land use. There is, of course, a domain of common sense regulations which anyone could agree on, such as limiting certain industrial development near schools and residential areas or protection of certain critical ecosystems on private property. These are areas where we can improve upon the mistakes of pre-zoning society. The government must serve to protect the people’s health and safety, not landowner’s property values.

Then what does a modern municipality without zoning look like? It entails a place where every landowner can decide to build whatever he may on his property. 

This is a town where anyone can walk to their local corner store, gym, or restaurant, as the market provides proper amenities where demanded. This is also a town where the built environment may be much more varied, as each neighbor expands upon their house as needed and builds in whatever style they like. This means that homeowners can contribute to the natural evolution of their neighborhood, instead of solely big developers. This will likely reduce the average scale of buildings and developments, bringing the modern neighborhood closer to that of the traditional Philadelphia neighborhood. The generally small scale of buildings means that defunct buildings can be repurposed with fewer barriers to entry as the economy evolves, while encouraging the presence of small businesses.

The ideas I propose are often half-heartedly encouraged by organizations like Strong Towns. Yet, it is clear that their method of slow reformation of existing zoning codes will never reach the goals proposed here. With these municipal codes often being exorbitantly long, only a complete rethinking of regulation can work toward a world where we build neighborhoods like our ancestors did. 

The tyranny of zoning is usually much worse than in our city of Philadelphia, where the nature of our legacy neighborhoods carry much of the existing land use into the zoning code. Yet outside these legacy neighborhoods, such as in Cherry Hill or Willow Grove, there is hardly any new mixed-use or walkable development. The only way to completely change the fabric of America into more liveable and community-oriented neighborhoods, is through the upheaval of state authority on land use.

Simon Webber is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying economics with an interest in real estate development.