While pouring through a used book bin I came across a city planning book from the mid 60’s. The pages had a yellow patina, it had what would now be considered a modern minimalist cover, and it was titled “Community and Privacy – Toward a New Architecture of Humanism”. It highlighted what I thought was a very interesting problem—cities struggling to remain peaceful, quiet, and connected—while advocating for a number of solutions. What most interested me about the book however was not the authors insights or solutions, but how well it captured the attitudes of the time. People were trying to fix these problems with top-down solutions, something that sometimes worked and sometimes played out poorly for cities, slowing development and creating new, harder to solve problems.
At the time there was no shortage of problems cities were facing as they grew larger, and in many ways these problems and new ones still exist today. Large cities were getting denser while they were making way for more and more cars. Moreover, three and a half decades earlier the supreme court had cemented in place the power for cities to determine who could build what where, creating a whole generation of city planners who were now maturing into the workplace. In the book, the authors go over his predecessors’ opinions on good design, while looking at the problems modern cities faced while presenting some solutions. While it appeared zoning was the future of cities at the time, and it certainly has its place, its importance may have been overstated now that we’ve been able to see their work play out. Additionally, when done poorly this well-intentioned zoning can be detrimental to large cities. Although there were a number of problems, one issue regularly pointed to in Detroit as it declined was its strict zoning laws, preventing new business from starting up or more modern buildings to be built. In its effort to preserve buildings and prevent neighborhoods from changing it imposed strict limits on what kinds of houses could be built where, pushing up rents and creating an impoverished ring of low quality housing around the city, driving up crime and pushing out business. A similar situation has occurred in the bay area and San Francisco, where in not wanting their neighborhoods to change as tech companies move in they’ve neglected to change zoning laws, preventing new buildings. This has had the unfortunate result of limiting supply and driving up prices, forcing out the exact people who had elected officials to prevent new housing from being built.
It may be well documented by economists that less housing supply leads to higher rent and housing prices, but what happens when we don’t have zoning laws? Well you end up with cities like Houston. Houston is the fourth largest city in the US and is expected to overtake Chicago soon, where it’s home to a wide variety of industries but was originally home to some of our largest oil companies and still is to this day. There of course appear to be clear downsides to not having zoning laws. For one it’s not really a city lots of tourists go to, as instead of having one massive downtown like Chicago or New York it instead has about a dozen different downtowns, more set up for locals than tourists. We also don’t see staggered towers like the ones that were made famous in New York; instead skyscrapers tend to raise straight up to maximize floor space. This gives Houston its own unique and beautiful look, though most would argue less beautiful than that of New York.
There are a few things Houston’s lack of zoning laws get right though, the largest of which is costs. Houston rents tend to be much lower compared to comparable offices and homes in other cities, and it’s often easier to renovate and change your buildings as your needs change as well. One good way to compare rents is to look at the costs of co-working spaces, such as those provided by companies like WeWork. In Houston, a hot desk might cost you $275 a month, while in Los Angeles it would cost you $400 a month and in New York a comparable desk would cost you $525 (prices as of Feb. 2019). Prices like these are possible because in Houston buildings are build the moment they might be profitable, not when the city needs office space so badly that it re zones a district. Buildings can also be built more rapidly to meet demand, as it doesn’t have to go through an approval process that regularly takes years.
But this still leaves a major concern; how do cities become easily navigable if city planners can’t plan out the city? How can we ensure oil refineries don’t end up near our subdivision? And the answer is scary, because we can’t say for certain that nobody will and sometimes they do. Recently someone built a sex toy and lingerie shop near a housing division, making residents concerned. In the past as developers looked for land to build more office space on a tall office buildings was built next to a housing suburb. This sort of development is a concern, but developers don’t build this way because it doesn’t make economic sense to. It hurts the value of a premium office buildings if it’s near a subdivision, and land value on an oil refinery would be too high if it were placed near an office park or nice homes. The truth is that economics push like buildings together, creating coherent neighborhoods and traversable streets. They’re build this way because the consumers buying and paying for the property want grid streets and want their office space near offices and housing near houses.
So what can we do about city planning? Well it’s hard to say. But what we do know is this antiquated idea that cities need to be heavily zoned in a top-down approach appears to be misguided; it sets the city up for failure if the planners turn out to be wrong. Using lighter touch or no touch approaches to zone cities allows them to adapt quickly and more effectively, and over time we tend to see these cities become more enjoyable to live compared to those which never had to endure years of top-down zoning.
Note: for those of you curious, I'm not actively recommending you purchase the book “Community and Privacy”. Although I thought it was an interesting take on the state of city planning at the time the book lacks substance. I’d instead recommend Jane Jacob’s “The Life and Death of the Great American City”. It’s one of the more influential books on the matter and a much more historically significant book. She goes after the top-down approach many planners were using at the time and instead recommends more data/experiential driven design, based off how other existing cities have reacted to particular city plans.