800: the other leading weblog

October 10, 2007

Zoning and neighbors

Matthew Yglesias comments (as he does from time to time) on the problem of zoning and land use for improving the environment. Megan McArdle jumps in to say that the problem is the whole endeavor--that zoning is too powerful, that the pattern we see of neighbors demanding low-density developments isn't a problem for most people, but the whole point. Therefore, the idea of saying "zoning, but"--of making zoning better--is nonsensical, since for most people it's working fine.

I agree with that. The problem is--there's no good solution. There are good reasons to zone--there are such things as truly incompatible uses, even if zoning out, say, duplexes from neighborhoods otherwise composed of single-family homes isn't one of them. And once the zoning is in place, it's easy to move it from those cases I see as appropriate to the ones where I think it's abusive and exclusionary. You are, after all, putting people who have something specific up against people who don't--present homeowners versus potential future renters, for instance.

But imagine if we jettisoned zoning--Houston is the typical example, but we can look at it without Houston. Right now, homeowner associations are used to pool resources to care for common-owned areas. Stronger forms also regulate things like aesthetics (ranging from lawn upkeep to house color to whether you can put up clothes lines). If we abolished zoning, it's not tough to see developers creating single-family neighborhoods that vest certain rights of ownership with the homeowner association, rather than the home owner. This wouldn't exactly replicate zoning, but it's not tough to see it hitting the high points, though in a more fragmented manner.

It could be that fragmentation would help developers, or it could be that it would hurt them. Overall, I think you'd see a lot more chaos, with no good result, only more unhappiness with the whole thing.

What I think we need are more tools for mitigating the problems of urban change. Chicagoland has, for example, home value insurance which pays out for local events that deflate home values. This takes the pressure off of homeowners to fight every last thing that might lower the value of their nest egg.

Improving how we approach gentrification in another issue. Typically, gentrification involves high-income households displacing low-income households--dispersing them to other parts of the city, but maintaining the present density. What if we worked to strike a grand bargain, welcoming high-income households in exchange for loosening development restrictions with the goal of allowing those otherwise-displaced low-income households to remain in their neighborhoods.

And we could re-orient zoning. The tools that we have right now are extremely crude--better ones (such as performance zoning or form-based zoning) are out there. I don't know as much about these, so I might be wrong, but my impression is that they try to compromise between development freedom and retaining important neighborhood elements.

The big thing, as Matt notes, is: how do we move beyond local control. I don't think there's anyway to do this in any ultimate sense. But stronger regionalism will help. More urban investment (and the strings that come with it) from the federal government will help. And states looking for more innovative tools will help.