“Houston has no zoning” is a very popular urban planning meme. It has its roots in Houston’s lacks one very specific kind of zoning: Euclidean separation of residential, commercial, and industrial uses. Euclidean zoning happens to be the one kind of planning that people easily understand (the whole meatpacking-plant-in-my-backyard fear), and so the usual panoply of density-inhibiting regulations (parking minimums, minimum lot requirements, FAR restrictions, etc.) is downplayed or even outright ignored, despite Michael Lewyn’s claims that Houston is in many ways more restrictive than even its Sun Belt neighbors.
But still, despite its pervasiveness, I was surprised to hear from commenter Alon Levy that in a 2001 interview with Reason Magazine, even Jane Jacobs was still laboring under the myth:
Reason: When the change comes, if it is an incremental, slowly evolving, uncontrolled sort of natural change, it’s easy for society to accommodate that, isn’t it?
Jacobs: Yes it is. But if all that zoning is kept, that can’t happen.
Reason: This is why I’m one of the few people you’ve met who likes Houston, because it has no zoning.
Jacobs: It has no zoning. But all the same, it looks like all the places that do have zoning. Because the same developers and bankers who deal with places that do have zoning carry their same ideas when they finance or build something in Houston.
Reason: There are not enough Houstons to change the way things are built or developed?
Jacobs: Right.
Maybe I’m just a sadist, but my favorite part of the interview was the first few pages where the interviewer tries to get Jacobs to support the usual libertarian “war on cars” line and she deftly avoids it. Finally, he thinks he’s gotten her when she says something bad about New Urbanism, but then it turns out that her issue seems more to be that New Urbanist communities aren’t really urban enough.
My years of reading Reason has informed me that Houston has something called “deeds”, though one look at the place (from the air…) does in fact lead me to believe that the result is no different from any other American city that was largely developed after WWII. Which convinces me that urban form is much more a result of time (and place) than zoning, or lack thereof.
The “Reason” interview by Bill Steigerwald is one of my favorite interviews of Jane Jacobs, and one of the “classics” that seem to be cited frequently. Another “classic” and much cited interview, this from a more liberal admirer (so it seems to me), is the one done by Jim Kunstler for “Metropolis Magazine.” (Kunstler’s version of the interview on his own website seems to have a more extended version of the interview.)
As good as Steigerwald interview is, though, I wonder if he and Jacobs may have been talking past one another sometimes, and thus not really talking about the same things on some occasions. This also seems to me to have been the case in some other good Jane Jacobs interviews as well and, if true, I think part of the “problem” is that it’s just much harder (for both parties) to be specific and precise about a topic in “casual” conversation than it is when writing. (After all, it’s an interview, not a cross-examination.) Or, then again, maybe they really were talking about the same things, but it didn’t come across clearly to me because I couldn’t hear the tone of voice, see the body language, etc?
It doesn’t surprise me that Jacobs seems to have been unaware in 2001 about the extensiveness of Houston’s “zoning-type” regulations, as Michael Lewyn’s article — a terrific challenge to conventional wisdom — seems to me to have been a real eye opener for 2005. Also, Jane Jacobs’ arguments seem to me to be slightly different, maybe more geared to a discussion of genuinely “zoned” regulations (rather than “zoning-type” regulations); and she seems to be discussing, at least to a certain extent, a slightly different phenomenon (how ideals, rather than laws, can influence what we do). In some ways, Jacobs seems to be discussing here what I was mentioning in the recent thread on why universities so often seem to be anti-urban: what gets done is based, at least partly, on the ideas that “people” have in their heads.
Nevertheless, I wonder if Jacobs ever became familiar with Lewyn’s work? I can’t help but think that she would have been delighted that Lewyn just didn’t accept the conventional wisdom but rather used his legal background to actually investigate the reality of the situation.
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Jacobs is a lot more pro-car than people give her credit for — and, so it seems to me, more pro-car than many of her admirers. Parts of “Death and Life of Great American Cites” (most especially the first chapter where she discusses autos) read almost like a paen to the automobile. What Jacobs is really against is the destruction of cities in order to cater to the drivers of private autos.
Benjamin Hemric
Sat., January 22, 2011, 11:55 p.m.
It’s more than just deeds. Houston has the following rules, which in New York would be called zoning:
1. Generous parking minimums, citywide.
2. Minimum setbacks, set at a level that incentivizes putting parking strips in front of each store.
3. Up until recently, a large minimum lot size, again citywide.
4. A rule saying that when developers map out streets on new subdivisions, the minimum width is lower if all properties are deed-restricted to single-family residential.
5. Street design standards that are more appropriate for highways than urban streets, for example large curve radius.
6. A rule saying that local streets should discourage through-traffic, incentivizing suburban cul-de-sacs.
Yes – I think “talking past each other” is a perfect way to describe the conversation, and is very much what I felt while reading it. I’m not sure that Jacobs really understood the whole libertarian “war on cars” type arguments, because if she did, I think she would have pushed back more forcefully.
Then again, maybe I’m just projecting my own opinions onto her. This seems to be quite common with Jacobs, perhaps because of how prolific yet vague-on-policy she was.
From what I understand, the deed restrictions apply mostly to the more suburban parts, whereas the parts closer to the core – i.e., the places where density actually has a shot at happening – are zoned out through the regulations that Alon cites.