The Antiplanner’s Library: Zoned in the USA

A review of this 2014 book on Amazon says, “Hirt explains that in the early 20th century, pro-zoning interests argued that zoning was a means of increasing homeowners’ property values and excluding lower socio-economic classes.” Since that’s not far from one of the conclusions of American Nightmare, I was intrigued to see if she followed the same line of reasoning as the Antiplanner or reached that conclusion from a different direction.

Click image to go to the book publisher’s web page for this book. Click the link above (“2014 book”) to buy this book from Abehbooks.com.

It turns out the reviewer was wrong; Hirt briefly quotes others who argue that zoning “serves as a local immigration law that protects the rich from the poor” (p. 45), but it is hardly the focus of her book. Instead, her main question as an immigrant from eastern Europe herself is: why do Americans zone for such low densities and a separation of residential from other uses when Europeans seem perfectly happy living above stores and across the street from amusement parks? She also correctly observes that, relative to the rest of the developed world, Americans have moderate homeownership rates but high rates of single-family detached housing (p. 20), and wonders why this is the case as well.

Unfortunately, her answers are almost entirely wrong because she fails to understand or account for the major factors in the history of urbanization and zoning. She argues that, because America is a land of such wide-open spaces, we are more culturally inclined to want to live in single-family homes separate from shops and other businesses. “Culture” can mean a lot of things, but what she means by it is completely different from what really happened.

First, it is worth noting that her review of American cities gets lots of facts wrong. She accepts without question other peoples’ claims that “spaces taken by highways, roads, parking, driveways, gas stations, etc. in U.S. cities and suburbs occupies well over a quarter of the total built landscape” (p. 23). This was proven to be an urban legend by no less than Donald Shoup almost a decade before the 2006 book cited by Hirt.

A bigger error is in her comparison of urban densities in various metropolitan areas in Europe and the United States. Her chart on page 24 shows that Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Moscow all have about 10,000 people per square mile, while New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other American urban areas all have about 1,000 people or fewer per square mile. Her error was using metropolitan statistical areas, which include all lands in partly urbanized counties whether those lands are urban or not. The Los Angeles urbanized area has 7,000 people per square mile, not much less than those in Europe, but the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside metropolitan area, which is what Hirt used, includes all of the Mojave Desert as far east as the Nevada border and has a density of about 500 people per square mile. In other words, major European urban areas are two or three times denser than major American urban areas, not ten or more times denser as Hirt’s chart indicates.

Aside from these factual errors, Hirt completely misses the two major reasons why American cities differ from those in Europe: first, transportation and technology; and second, the influence of immigration.

Urban areas of today have grown in four great eras: preindustrial before 1820, when cities were very dense but had no major job concentrations; the early industrial era from 1820 to about 1890 when factories and offices concentrated jobs in urban centers and most people had to walk to work; the streetcar era from 1890 to 1920 when middle-class people moved out to suburbs of single-family homes because they could take trolleys to work; and the automobile era of 1920 on when everyone could move to the suburbs and drive to work.
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Most European urban areas did most of their growth in the first two eras when transport was mainly by foot. Thus, they are very dense. The only major American cities that grew in this era were Boston, Providence, New York, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco. These cities are dense, but because the urban areas surrounding them grew mainly in the streetcar and automobile eras, the overall urban areas are not so dense. Other cities grew later; after all, until around 1916, most Americans still lived in rural areas.

The automobile, more than anything else, explains the separation of uses that so puzzles Hirt. As recently as 1960, there were still little grocery stores within walking distance of most homes in American cities. But these stores were dying out, not because of zoning, but because the automobile had made possible competition in the form of supermarkets, discount stores, and eventually supercenters and warehouse stores. No one building a grand shopping mall, factory, or office park would want to intersperse their stores or other structures in residential areas because doing so would create barriers for most of their customers and workers. Instead, thanks to the liberation of movement created by the automobile, retailers, manufacturers, and other businesses could locate their operations in major centers and let their customers and employees drive to them.

The other factor that Hirt almost completely misses is that America is a land of immigrants while Europe, for the most part, is a land of natives. Moreover, many if not most immigrants to America came from countries where private land ownership was rare and they dreamed of owning their own farm or home. The key is that each wave of immigrants–Irish, Chinese, southern European, and most recently Latino–generated stress and hostility among the people who already lived here.

An important point in American Nightmare is that, as of 1890 or so, homeownership rates were much higher among working-class immigrant families than among established middle-class families. The reason is that working-class families saw homes as an additional source of income from borders, in-home businesses, vegetable gardens, and small livestock. Middle-class families didn’t want to live next to immigrants with completely different tastes and lifestyles, so they rented making it easier for them to move if “undesirables” moved in next door.

By outlawing in-home businesses, livestock, and other sources of domestic income, zoning made homeownership safe for the middle class. As Hirt fails to note, however, so long as zoning was confined to the cities, it did not create a barrier for working-class homeownership after 1920 or so because they could take their cars and drive outside of the cities and build homes with little regulation.

A third major historical failing is Hirt’s confusion about how zoning influenced urban growth. The short answer is: it didn’t, at least not until states began mandating zoning of rural areas. She makes it appear that Americans live in single-family homes separated from other uses because zoning codes forced them to do so. In fact, it is the other way around: given streetcar and automobility, Americans chose to live in single-family homes, and then zoning was applied to their neighborhoods to protect them from unwanted intrusions.

That’s still the way it works in parts of the country that don’t have a lot of rural land-use regulation. While there is a market for mixed-use developments, it is small and easily saturated by existing inner-city neighborhoods in most urban areas (especially ones built in the pre-automobile eras). As a result, most new neighborhoods built outside of incorporated cities in Texas, Nevada, and other states with little or no rural zoning look exactly like the neighborhoods that Hirt says were created by zoning: lots of single-family homes geographically separated from but connected by automobiles to other uses.

In short, starting with erroneous data and ignoring important historical factors, Hirt gets almost everything wrong about the role of zoning in American urban areas. She does have a fascinating chapter about how land-use regulation works in Europe, but given her many errors about America, I’m not willing to trust it before going to all her sources.