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Review: Key to the City, by Sara Bronin

A review of a book that endorses more flexible zoning, but doesn't reject zoning entirely.

In Key to the City, Sara Bronin both critiques and defends zoning.  Like numerous other commentators (including myself) Bronin points out that anti-density regulations such as minimum lot size and minimum parking requirements artificially increase housing costs.  Her critique of the latter regulation is especially interesting; she points out that even in car-dependent small towns, minimum parking requirements make it difficult for businesses to expand or apartments to be built. As a result, the parking reform movement is not limited to the most walkable or transit-friendly cities: for example, rural Sandpoint, Idaho, has abolished parking minimums in its downtown.

However, Bronin is not a zoning abolitionist.  She shows how zoning can support pro-environmental policies.  For example, she shows how Tucson, Arizona uses zoning to limit water consumption, by limiting the amount of land that can be “covered by non-drought-tolerant landscaping, such as turf grass”.  Tuscon also requires commercial landowners to “plant one tree for every four new parking spaces, which promotes stormwater absorption.” In rainy Seattle, zoning requires property owners to manage stormwater through a variety of techniques, such as tree planning, installing green roofs, or installing “permeable paving that allows stormwater to soak into the soil below.”  Although these regulations limit the negative environmental externalities of development (good) I wonder whether they increase the cost of living and doing business in those cities (not so good).

Although zoning has traditionally forced development into suburbia by limiting downtown density and height, Bronin cites Burlington, Vermont’s zoning code as an example of a code that goes in another direction.  Burlington requires buildings to be “between three and fourteen stories, which is consistent with, and even denser than, existing architecture.”  I wonder, however, whether there are landowners who can only afford to build smaller buildings.  She also discusses the code of Delray Beach, Florida, which requires large apartment buildings to have a diverse mix of apartment sizes in order to attract families; this risks distorting the market, because if there is no demand for one type of housing, then housing units might be underutilized.

Bronin also discusses regulations that do promote walkability but are not as obviously costly as stormwater and landscaping regulations.  For example, form-based codes often require buildings to be set near a property line rather than being set back between yards of parking.  Delray Beach’s code prohibits blank walls with no features, and requires larger buildings to create 10-foot passageways “for bikers and pedestrians to connect to alleys, streets and parking behind the building.” The code tries to make buildings more visually interesting by requiring owners to adopt one of seven architectural styles.  None of these regulations seem obviously costly to me. 

Even if some regulations are obviously harmless, there is still a strong case for zoning abolition, or at least for more aggressive state preemption of local zoning?  In theory, there can be a happy medium between no zoning and the overly restrictive status quo.  But it seems to me that this happy medium is almost never achieved, primarily because even if the national interest supports cheap housing, the interest of each individual homeowner (or town full of homeowners) favors costly and exclusive housing.  Thus, abolition may be the lesser evil even if it is not ideal.

The existence of minimum ages for drinking, voting, etc. is somewhat analogous. Just as a few 10-year olds can probably be trusted to vote responsibility, a few municipalities can (perhaps) be trusted to zone in a way that does not make housing or business unnecessarily costly or car-dependent. But I don’t think most members of either class can be trusted completely.

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