If you’ve ever done a Google Scholar search for anything zoning related, you’ll probably recognize the name William Fischel. He’s an economic historian at Dartmouth who’s written a lot about local government, and especially land use regulations. He’s got a wide-ranging paper published in 2004 called “An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for its Exclusionary Effects,” and while I can’t speak to the recommendations part, the history is pretty interesting.
If you’ve ever wondered why the City of Greater New York never became the City of Even Greater New York, this seems to explain it:
After zoning became popular around 1910-20, suburbs no longer had to view development like that of its larger urban neighbourhood as inevitable. A small town could control its land use and fiscal destiny in the face of urban development. Consolidation no longer looked so attractive and suburbs began co-operating with one another to provide water and other basic services that had scale economies, which had previously been the monopoly of the central city. Zoning thus allowed suburbs to remain independent indefinitely.
Fischel’s more general, more controversial (well, as controversial as these things go…) thesis is that it was specifically the advent of buses and trucks (and not automobiles) which triggered zoning codes in non-rural jurisdictions across the US, both cities and their suburbs. If you look at only big cities, especially New York, it’s easy to see the zoning code as a reaction to big city issues like rapid transit or skyscrapers. But Fischel argues that the zeal with which suburban municipalities adopted comprehensive zoning means there must be a more general explanation (citations removed):
Many accounts give New York City’s 1916 ordinance the honour of being the first comprehensive zoning law, in that it included the whole city in some zone or anoth! er. It i s clear, however, that several other American cities were developing similar ordinances at the same time. Had New York not been first, several other cities were poised to take the title.
It seems unlikely, then, that zoning thus was the product of circumstances in one particular place. Nor, I submit, was it the product of planners who had embraced the ‘City Beautiful’ movement, progressives who supported scientific management of government or lawyers who argued for an expansive view of the police power. The roles of planners, progressives and lawyers were, I believe, supply responses to a popular demand for zoning. This popular demand did not manifest itself as direct democracy. It was filtered through housing developers, who, I shall demonstrate presently, found that they sell homes for more profit if the community had zoning.
Focus on the larger cities for zoning’s origins tends to cause modern scholars to overlook that zoning quickly spread to the suburbs and small towns in metropolitan areas. Zoning suburbanised by the 1920s and spread rapidly. Eight cities had zoning by the end of 1916. By 1926, 68 more cities had adopted it and, between 1926 and 1936, zoning was adopted by 1246 municipalities. If these numbers look small by today’s standards, it is worth emphasising that most suburban development prior to 1910 took place within established central-city boundaries or on suburban territory that was quickly annexed to the city rather than independently incorporated. Thus the number of independent suburbs that would have occasion to adopt zoning was relatively small and the fraction that did so was impressive.
Far be it from me to criticize William Fischel (okay, this is the part where I criticize William Fischel…), but I think his analysis could have used a little more nuance when it comes to “developers.” There’s a difference between the small number of large, politically connected developers � the kind who knew where the ! subways were going to be built, and who may have advantages when it comes to zoning � and the many small builders who weren’t working with insider knowledge and couldn’t get favors from planners. It may be harder to find out what the small developers were thinking and doing, but it at least deserves a mention.
Anyway, if I’ve kept your interest this long, you should read the whole thing. It’ll be good for you.
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